Is the NSA Worth Preserving? [View all]

[HardTimes99]

I have contacted my Rep (Maxine Waters) and Senator Boxer twice in the past three weeks, as the NSA story has developed and permutated. (Feinstein's Washington # rang busy the first time and I didn't bother trying her again after she preemptively labeled Snowden a 'traitor').

As the episode has deepened and lengthened, I find my thoughs continually swirling and find it hard to make any sustained arguments.

So I thought it might be productive and useful to push back almost to first principles and ask a couple basic questions:

1) Is the NSA necessary to the national security of the United States or can it be significantly curtailed and\or ended?

and

2) If there is a need for the NSA, what exactly is that need? Is there anything about the NSA and what it does that is worth preserving?

I plan to contact Rep. Waters and Sen. Boxer at least one more time about these matters and was thinking I would ask that the NSA budget be cut as one way to re-assert meaningful Congressional oversight over it. But even as I type this, that suggestion seems like sort of a knee-jerk response. I am a layperson with no experience in national security or diplomacy and relatively little experience in politics (although I've worked briefly in telecom and longer in IT). So I felt like I would sound like a fool if I called for a budget cut to the NSA if I did not have some rational basis for doing so. And then I thought, based on some of the fine discussions I have read here, that there might actually be a good reason(s) for continuing the NSA largely as it is.

Based on the awesome discussions I've read here and the many fine voices on both sides of the divide, I think it should be possible to discuss the two questions above without resort to taunts or invective. If a thread like this one has already taken place here, I will gladly retract this one to save folks the trouble of posting their opinions yet again. (If you can point me to the link to that earlier discussion if it exists, it would be much appreciated.)