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Of course, the liaison between the NSA and its allies was a two way street. In 2013, none of these other countries had a global network of geosynchronous sensors in outer space and under the ocean that could monitor signals from missile launching, submarine, military deployments, nuclear tests and other matters of strategic importance to them. Nor did these allies have the cipher-breaking capabilities of the array of NSA super computers. The NSA had assiduously built these means at a cost of over a half trillion dollars and employed tens of thousands of linguists who could translate almost any dialect or language of interest.

Even though these allies had their own ciphers services and local capabilities they depended on NSA to provide them a large share of their signal intelligence. From the perspective of defending themselves from potential threats, the deal that these allies had with NSA was a mutually-advantageous.

The NSA’s overseas intelligence gathering was not limited to adversary nations. With the exception of the Five-Eye allies, it gathered data that was deemed of importance by the President and Defense Department in friendly countries. These operations had been approved by every American President, and funded by every American Congress, since 1941. After all, even in the realm of allies, activities take place that run counter to American interests. The 911 conspiracy, for example, was hatched in Hamburg, Germany and financed in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Nor were American allies unaware of the reach of the NSA. “Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it is true we use computers to sort through data by using keywords,” former CIA Director James Woolsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2000, “Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we are looking for?” Whether or not it was appreciated by other countries, the global harvesting of communication intelligence by the NSA was hardly secret.

As the NSA expanded further, it delegated part of its work to regional bases, including ones in Utah, Texas, Hawaii and Japan. The paramount task of the NSA remained monitoring the channels of communications that an adversary might use. The vast proliferation of these channels in cyberspace, which included email, social media, document sharing and other innovations of the Internet age, greatly complicated this task. Even so, this challenge was not insurmountable because most of the Internet actually travelled through fiber-glass land-line cables that crossed the territories of the United States, Britain and Australia. So the NSA found the technical means, including voluntary gaining access to major Internet companies, to “harvest” vast amounts of this Internet data. America’s other intelligence agencies quickly recognized the value of the communications intelligence gleaned from foreign telecommunications. John E. McLaughlin, who was the CIA’s Acting Director in 2004, described the NSA as nothing less than the “very foundation of US intelligence.” This service proceeded from the immense amount of foreign data that the NSA vacuumed in through its global sensors. This data allowed the CIA and other US intelligence services a means for verifying the reports of its human sources as well as discovering new targets in adversary nations for further investigation.

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