''Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?''

[Octafish]

42. Nothing like missing the point.

Last edited Sun Aug 25, 2013, 09:17 AM - Edit history (1)

Good job!

How the NSA spied on Americans before the Internet

By Caitlin Dewey
Washington Post, August 23

EXCERPT...

Spying on Americans

The problem then, however, was much the same as the problem today: The logged calls and telegrams often involved U.S. citizens. A 1975 investigation into Nixon-era intelligence practices, organized under the so-called the Church Committee, found that the NSA had eavesdropped on 1,200 Americans between 1967 and 1973, often because of their political activities. In the early ’60s, the agency monitored every telephone call between the U.S. and Cuba before moving on to spy on civil rights activists, anti-war demonstrators and celebrities. Under SHAMROCK, NSA analysts logged and read millions of telegrams sent to and from Americans, including an estimated 150,000 telegrams per month in the last three years of the program.

“NSA officials told (the House Intelligence Committee) in closed session that at present NSA is not eavesdropping on domestic or overseas telephone calls placed by (Americans),” reads a brief about the Church hearings in the New York Times. It continues:

“Many (committee) members still have ‘doubts’ that NSA is not intruding on telephone calls placed in US by Amer citizens.”

As a result of the Church hearings, Congress passed a number of reforms that tried to narrow the use of wiretaps to cases where critical national security information was at stake. But Congress struggled to address another issue identified in the hearings: The NSA’s technology was quickly becoming so advanced, and so secretive, that the government didn’t know how to legislate it. In the words of the Church committee in 1976:

The watch list activities and the sophisticated capabilities that they highlight present some of the most crucial privacy issues facing this nation. Space-age technology has outpaced the law.

That problem, as we’ve learned recently, never really went away. For one thing, oversight didn’t exactly improve: A 1990 series in The Post delved into the agency’s regulation and found that fewer than 10 congressmen even had the clearance to see everything the agency was doing and what it produced, let alone to exercise any oversight. Former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga.) told The Post’s Vernon Loeb in 1999 that Congress had not asked the NSA a single “hard question about electronic surveillance” in the preceding 24 years.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/23/how-the-nsa-spied-on-americans-before-the-internet/

ETA: article.

FYI: When it isn't "We the People" running the government we have a problem. Police States spy on the citizens, giving them an edge with perceived enemies, almost certainly with particular elected representatives. Democracies are aware of what the government does in the name of the People.