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34. Agree, totally. Here's added perspective from Michael Ames of Harper's...

On the NSA’s That ’70s Show Rerun

What would Frank Church say about the Snowden Affair?

By Michael Ames
Harper's, PERSPECTIVE — June 21, 2013, 9:00 am

EXCERPT...

The Snowden Affair is a “rerun” of issues first uncovered during the 1970s, though these problems trace back to the earliest American efforts at espionage, says Shea. Between 1975 and 1976, the Church committees produced more than a dozen reports detailing the illegal activities of the NSA, CIA, and FBI, which included opening mail, intercepting telegrams, planting bugs, wiretapping, and attempting to break up marriages, foment rivalries and destroy careers of private citizens. “We thought we put a stop to this wholesale collection of information on Americans forty years ago,” says Peter Fenn, another former Church staffer.

Espionage and its attendant notions of paranoia and dishonor were established intrigues of the era. In 1970, before Nixon made eavesdropping the iconic crime of the decade, a Newsweek cover asked, “Is Privacy Dead?” Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) starred Gene Hackman as a tech-savvy private eye who runs around San Francisco in a membranous trench coat, penetrating various barriers to privacy before eventually succumbing to the paranoia inherent to his work. Later that year, Seymour Hersh and the New York Times broke a bombshell about the CIA’s “family jewels” operations—a nefarious laundry list of overseas-assassination plots, break-ins, and surveillance of journalists (current Fox News commentator Brit Hume among them) and popular antiwar figures including Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon.

SNIP...

According to an internal report written by NSA historian George Howe and declassified in 2007, the NSA has had “responsibilities exceeding its ill-defined powers” since it was a military outfit known as the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) in the early 1950s. The revelations that the government had ordered Verizon to turn over bulk call logs of millions of customers, and that the NSA’s PRISM program had, with the participation of tech companies, gained access to private electronic communications was scandalous, but far from unprecedented; in the years after World War I, Herbert Yardley, the pioneering codebreaker and founder of the proto-NSA Cipher Bureau, coerced Western Union and Postal Telegraph into sharing private international telegrams. The secret arrangement expanded after World War II to include RCA Global and ITT World Communications, helping the government copy and store ever greater troves of data, first on reels of punched paper and then on magnetic tape. The program, which ran from 1945 to 1975, was codenamed SHAMROCK, and according to a report written in 2007 by former CIA Inspector General Britt Snider, it was “known only to a few people within the government.”

SNIP...

Nearly forty years after Church, the NSA has grown to three times the size of the CIA. Partly in response to the gross intelligence failures of the years leading up to September 11, 2001, the physical infrastructure of surveillance has metastasized. In the Utah desert, the government is finishing construction on a massive data center — essentially a $2 billion external hard drive — that Bamford reports will use as much energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

When Pat Shea left the senate intelligence committee in 1976 to move back to Utah for work at a private law firm, a friend who worked for the CIA gave him a satellite photo of Salt Lake City. “Just know that we’ll always be watching,” the man joked. Shea left Washington wary of intelligence overreach, but he also believes, contra Snowden, that most of what the NSA is currently doing entails “reasonable law enforcement.” He also recognizes that since 9/11, there has been constant pressure to build a more powerful vacuum cleaner. Contractors like Snowden’s Booz Allen Hamilton have been brought in to offer the government more eyes and ears, earning billions for their services, and bringing us to an era when roughly 1.4 million Americans have top-secret clearance.

CONTINUED...

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/06/on-the-nsas-rerun-of-that-70s-show/