NSA Provides Warning about Itself

The warning is five pages long and entitled “SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016.” In its mission statement, the National Security Agency describes how it wants to expand its abilities to keep all electronic communication under surveillance. A central goal is to collect “data we need from anyone, anytime, anywhere.” Anything else is subordinate to this goal, even the main tenets of free and constitutional societies.

The document is full of alarming statements and wordings. The goals mentioned in sections 2.1.2 to 2.1.4 provide an example: “Counter the challenge of ubiquitous, strong, commercial network encryption,” “counter indigenous cryptographic programs by targeting their industrial bases with all available SIGINT and HUMINT capabilities” — meaning technological surveillance and spies — “influence the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships, HUMINT, and second and third party partners.”

Thus, the NSA’s goal is to make encryption worthless. Technology created — partially by the NSA — to enable a confidential and secure environment for privacy and communication among people is now supposed to be undermined on a global scale.

However, if encryption cannot be trusted any more, then journalists cannot contact their sources anymore without endangering their informants. The same is true for lawyers and their clients, and of course, also for politicians, since even they have relied on having conversations about delicate topics with tap-proof technology so far.

“Not everything that is technologically possible is permitted or politically smart,” Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier said this in the parliamentary debate on Nov. 18. Guido Westerwelle said almost the exact same thing when he summoned the American ambassador in Berlin. The latter then repeated it. To paraphrase from the paper, the NSA has a different view — for anything that is possible, we need its permission. More explicitly, page 3 states, “For SIGINT to be optimally effective, legal, policy, and process authorities must be as adaptive and dynamic as the technological and operational advances we seek to exploit.” It continues, “We aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

To speak bluntly, the NSA wants laws that allow everything it can do. However, it is the role of politics to define what a society looks like, not that of security agencies.

The document should be a warning to U.S. politicians about giving more power to the NSA than it already has. It should also be a warning to German politicians about misunderstanding the Snowden documents as a feasibility study, as the blogger Markus Beckedahl has aptly put it. The five-page paper shows what can become of a security agency that wants to create its own world.