The National Security Agency May Simultaneously Decrease National Security

The N.S.A. following the end of the cold war was ordered to downsize it's personnel by about a third. After 9-11 it recovered and ramped up its budget considerably building new facilities, hiring new people and finding new ways to tap into fiber optic communications. Perhaps because of the Bush-Cheney crank ideas about economics and privatization the N.S.A. also outsourced much of its work surveilling foreign and domestic communications through private contractors: more than 4000 contractors.

Today the major world fiber optic cables for communications send data globally at the speed of light. Even local calls and Internet messages in Asia may pass through California. The content may be copied live to be fed into N.S.A. computers-all of it.

Because of the vast amount of data-exabytes in the surveillance-industrial complex processing require advanced artificial intelligence and sorting programs technology to find those very dangerous terrorists in some fetid foreign swamp or hanging out in a motel outside Ft. Meade-the foreign contractors scanning through the data work for not only the U.S. Government but also for more than 50 other governments providing the same services not uncommonly.

Privatizing intelligence and Medicare would tend to make select private sector corporations 'too big to fail' and distribute U.S. data to the globe for their analysis and use. Americans will have no firewalls on foreign intelligence and global corporate intelligence analysts from knowing who they call on the phone, where they shop, what they eat, and what their business plans and energy usage is.

National security should create serious boundary firewalls to intelligence to stop the contemporary Internet and telephone infrastructure of the private sector from annihilating U.S. national security. While some Americans just don't care about keeping their personal affairs private, many do, and others haven't foreseen any deleterious future consequences as a result of the hegemony of adverse global corporate intelligence activity.

The U.S. Congress has failed to adapt to build firewalls and amorphous opacity requirements into telecommunications that would prevent the Microsofts, Googles,Nices, Narus' China Unicoms and Verints from capturing data for analysis in vast data storage facilities. Internet and telephone transactions could be constructed with an innate emphemerality that would scramble electrons after use. Entire bureaucracies and corporate sectors have evolved to function as Orwell's vampires on individual civil liberty. Government should continually work to build new national defense infrastructure into technology that assaults national sovereignty at the same time as it innovates and improves technical virtuosity.

An American citizen might wonder how full employment, good wages and a healthy environment might ever be constructed when the U.S. Government has heavily invested in privatizing much of its intelligence functions to global corporations, allowed the communications data of Americans to be pervasively captured by foreign agencies and let its employment sector become controlled by foreign or transnational corporations that may in effect keep U.S. employment levels wherever they like.

A citizen should encourage the U.S. Government to invest in philosophical research and analysis about the overall effect global corporations have on U.S. economic development, signals intelligence, acquisition and security of private Internet and telecommunications data transactions. The U.S. Government should invest in social philosophy analysis so far as to consider if the weight of economic capitalization and technical advantages of global corporations are helping or harming U.S. national economic development and the actual standard of living of the citizens of the United States.

The National Security Agency should be encouraged to develop a systems analysis capacity for the conservation of data security in the high-tech telecommunications environment. While the N.S.A. presently seems to be based upon copying data from telecoms and Internet corporations and fiber optics lines and further to develop private contractors to analyze the data, it should also find technical means to scramble all private data going in to the Internet cloud or wireless and land phone networks through necessary encryption of data such that only the private citizen can put the data together meaningfully with his/her 'half' of the technology. The danger to national security and civil liberties especially in the realm of free enterprise appear to far greater from corporate and government data acquisition than from terrorist attack.

Terrorist attacks might be better defended against through increased border security (no illegal entries to the U.S.A.), better, less destructable building designs, more surveillance of biological developers and so forth.