NSA spying more aggressive than ever, says Bamford

James Bamford

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has for the first time in its history appointed a “director of compliance”, whose office will supervise the lawfulness of NSA’s communications surveillance and other spy activities. The Agency, America’s largest intelligence organization, which is tasked with worldwide communications surveillance as well as communications security, has appointed John DeLong to the new post. But in a new column for Salon magazine, James Bamford argues that the gigantic agency is still overstepping its legal framework in both domestic and international spying. Bamford, who has authored several books on the NSA, interprets the Agency’s new data storage facilities in Texas and Utah as resulting from the Bush administration’s decision “to open the NSA’s surveillance floodgates following the 9/11 attacks”. He refers to the Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008, which is seen by many as the broadest legal mandate in NSA’s modern history, as giving the Agency “even broader authority to intercept international communications than the warrantless surveillance operations had” and .  And yet, despite the unprecedented powers afforded it by the Act, NSA is still “over-collecting on the domestic communications of Americans, thus even exceeding th[e Act’s] excessive reach”, says Bamford.