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The Rise of the NSA | 203

communications intelligence allowed the CIA (and other U.S. intelligence services) to test and verify the reports of their human sources in foreign countries. Moreover, because of the immense amount of foreign data that the NSA vacuumed in through its global sensors, it provided the CIA with an effective means for discovering new targets in adversary nations.

By the first decade of this century, the NSA’s surreptitious efforts to render the Internet transparent to U.S. intelligence had earned it a new set of enemies. They were the previously mentioned hacktivists 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. But the NSA did not conceal that it was intent on countering any attempt to interfere with its surveillance of the Internet. It built back doors into encryption and worked to unravel the Tor scrambling of IP addresses. It made leading hacktivists targets. Brian Hale, the spokesman for the director of national intelligence, disclosed that the United States routinely intercepted the cyber signatures of parties suspected of hacking into U.S. government networks.

Following the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the surveillance of the Internet became an integral part of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism. In October 2001, Congress expanded the NSA’s mandate by passing the USA Patriot Act. As I described earlier, 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. This put the NSA directly in the anti-terrorist business. It also necessitated the NSA vastly increasing its coverage of the Internet.

The mantra in government in this post-9/11 intelligence world became “connect the dots.” Congress through this act essentially demolished the wall between domestic and foreign intelligence when any NSA activity related to foreign-directed terrorism. It further made the NSA a partner with the FBI in tracking phone calls

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