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By the first decade of the 21st century, the NSA’s surreptitious efforts to render the Internet transparent to US intelligence had earned it a new set of enemies. They were the previously-mentioned hacktavists who were attempting to shield the activities of Internet users from the intrusions of government surveillance. They employed both encryption and TOR software to defeat that surveillance.

The NSA was not about to be defeated by the tactics of amateur privacy advocates. It did not conceal that it was intent on countering any attempt to interfere with its surveillance of the Internet. It built back doors into their encryption and worked to unravel the TOR scrambling of their IP addresses. It made leading hacktavists targets. Brian Hale, the spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, disclosed that the US routinely intercepted the cyber signatures of parties suspected of hacking into US government networks.

Following the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the surveillance of the Internet also became an integral part of Bush’ administration’s war on terrorism. In October 2001, Congress expanded the NSA’s mandate by passing the USA Patriot Act. Section 215 of the act directly authorized the NSA, with the approval of the FISA court, to collect and store domestic telephone billing records. The idea was to better coordinate domestic and foreign intelligence about Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. The mantra in government after the 9/11 was to “connect dots.” Congress with this back essentially called for demolishing the wall by domestic and foreign intelligence when it came to foreign-directed terrorism. The act effectively made the NSA a partner with the FBI in tracking phone calls made from the phones origination outside the United States by known foreign jihadists. If these calls were made to individuals inside the NSA was now authorized to retrieve the billing records of the person called and those people who he or she called. These traces were then supplied to the FBI. When a New York Times expose in 2008 revealing that NSA surveillance has been extended to domestic telephone used, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 explicitly allowing the NSA to continue these practices if it obtained a FISA court order. Congress also sanctioned the NSA’s supplying the FBI with the emails and other Internet activity of foreign Jihadists if it was suspected of planning attacks in America. This put the NSA directly in the anti-terrorist business in the United States. It also necessitated the NSA vastly increasing its coverage of the Internet.

The new duties also increased the NSA’s need to create new bureaucratic mechanism to monitor its compliance with FISA court orders, Rajesh De, the NSA’s General Counsel at the time of the Snowden breach, described the NSA as becoming by 2013 “one of the most regulated enterprises in the world.” Grafted onto its intelligence activities were layers of mandated reporting to oversight officials. Not only did the NSA have its own chief compliance officer, chief privacy and civil liberties officer, and independent inspector general but the NSA also had to report to a difference set of compliance officers at the Department of Defense the Office of National intelligence and the Department of Justice On top of reporting to those officials, the Department of Justice dispatched a team of lawyers every 60 days to review the results of “every

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