The Dangerous Opacity of the NSA

The idealistic American President Woodrow Wilson, who was deeply committed to the establishment of the League of Nations in Geneva, did not object to the idea of illegally collecting information from Western Union telegrams. This was in 1920. A little less than a century later, the entire world was scandalized by whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations which bring to light the far-reaching practices of the National Security Agency, an American intelligence organization.

With the exception of the two decades immediately following the adoption of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, America has regularly put its citizens under surveillance. Illegally. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 nonetheless mark a new era. The politicians in power have given the NSA a level of firepower that earlier agencies never had. The Europeans targeted by the NSA were rightly offended by it, even if it is not certain that their practices are that different.

The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations have seen an exponential growth in surveillance activities. They are convinced that these policies, reminiscent of Orwell’s thought police, have allowed them to avoid any major attack since 2001, with the exception of the Boston terrorist bombing.

One fact is particularly troubling: A secret document made public by Edward Snowden, according to The New York Review of Books, reveals that the judicial court that is supposed to give its approval to any surveillance activity had accused the NSA of violating the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and going against the court ruling. This example shows that the system of checks and balances, as far as the fight against terrorism is concerned, is either not functioning or is functioning poorly. In 2004, George W. Bush lied when he declared publicly that any wiretapping was approved by the court. In 2012, the current head of the NSA, Keith Alexander, also affirmed that the NSA operated with the judicial green light.

This unrestricted power of the NSA and the drones that the CIA has used to kill presumed terrorists in complete secrecy, has led the Obama administration to believe that it was possible to wage the war on terrorism secretly, painlessly and from a distance. They never guessed that such a policy would create a significant collateral victim: democracy. Is not democracy a contract of trust between a people and its government? With neither transparency nor a sense of accountability, post-Sept. 11 America does it a disservice.