Who is Spying on Whom and Why? by William Pfaff

Who is spying on Whom and Why? Paris, November 13, 2003 – It is the nature of bureaucracies to expand and accumulate prerogatives. The National Security Agency, a dusty post-second world war institution of routine habits and outdated technology, focused on Communist China and the remnants of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites, rejoiced when the 9/11 attacks occurred in New York and Washington.

Money, recruits, tasks poured in. War on Terror was declared. The money that flowed to the American intelligence agencies benefitted NSA more than any other non-Pentagon service. NSA, a bureaucracy in need, had no hesitation about boosting itself. The Snowden papers recount its pride in a 2007 letter of commendation the agency received for electronically locating a sniper inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. That’s what Global Surveillance was all about in those days.

Early in November of this year, The New York Times quoted an Agency boast that when Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, visited President Barack Obama at the White House last April, the President found before him a secretly intercepted copy of the UN head’s talking points (as if Mr. Obama might not have guessed what they would be). The Agency on its internal broadsheet listed this as the week’s “operational highlight.”

Unlike in 2001, the NSA now has an estimated 30-40 thousand employees worldwide (its assistant director, John C. Inglis, jokingly estimated in 2012 that the number of current employees was “between 37 thousand and one billion.”) 
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