To the people in control of the executive branch, violating our civil liberties is an essential government service. So \u2014 to ensure total fulfillment of Big Brother\u2019s vast responsibilities \u2014 the National Security Agency is insulated from any fiscal disruption.<\/p>\n
The NSA\u2019s surveillance programs are exempt from a government shutdown. With typical understatement, an unnamed official told The Hill that \u201ca shutdown would be unlikely to affect core NSA operations.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the top of the federal government, even a brief shutdown of \u201ccore NSA operations\u201d is unthinkable. But at the grassroots, a permanent shutdown of the NSA should be more than thinkable; we should strive to make it achievable.<\/p>\n
NSA documents, revealed by intrepid whistleblower Edward Snowden, make clear what\u2019s at stake. In a word: democracy.<\/p>\n
Wielded under the authority of the president, the NSA is the main surveillance tool of the U.S. government. For a dozen years, it has functioned to wreck our civil liberties. It\u2019s a tool that should not exist.<\/p>\n
In this century, the institutional momentum of the NSA \u2014 now fueled by a $10.8 billion annual budget \u2014 has been moving so fast in such a wrong direction that the agency seems unsalvageable from the standpoint of civil liberties. Its core is lethal to democracy.<\/p>\n
A big step toward shutting down the National Security Agency would be to mobilize political pressure for closure of the new NSA complex that has been under construction in Bluffdale, Utah: a gargantuan repository for ostensibly private communications.<\/p>\n
During a PBS NewsHour interview that aired on August 1, NSA whistleblower William Binney pointed out that the Bluffdale facility has a \u201cmassive amount of storage that could store all these recordings and all the data being passed along the fiberoptic networks of the world.\u201d He added: \u201cI mean, you could store 100 years of the world\u2019s communications here. That\u2019s for content storage. That\u2019s not for metadata.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NSA\u2019s vacuum-cleaner collection of metadata is highly intrusive, providing government snoops with vast information about people\u2019s lives. That\u2019s bad enough. But the NSA, using the latest digital technology, is able to squirrel away the content of telephone, e-mail and text communications \u2014 in effect, \u201cTiVo-ing\u201d it all, available for later retrieval.<\/p>\n
\u201cMetadata, if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world,\u201d Binney explained. \u201cThat\u2019s all the space you need. You don\u2019t need 100,000 square feet of space that they have in Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content.\u201d<\/p>\n
Already the NSA\u2019s Bluffdale complex in a remote area of Utah \u2014 seven times the size of the Pentagon \u2014 is serving as an archive repository for humungous quantities of \u201cprivate\u201d conversations that the agency has recorded and digitized.<\/p>\n