The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked, because I thought we've been funding this agency for 50 years ... People on both sides who say stu

The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked, because I thought we've been funding this agency for 50 years ... People on both sides who say stuff like that need to watch the United States of Secrets.[1] What's going on now is not business as usual. It's business since shortly after 9/11, when the Vice President's legal counsel wrote an order directing General Hayden, the NSA Director, to disable the agency's privacy protections and take whatever steps were necessary to find Al Qaeda, ignoring any sort of constitutional limits on domestic spying. Career NSA employees described the change as bringing the agency back to what it had been when Nixon resigned. We've been funding this agency for 62 years, but after the Church Commission found that they greatly overstepped their bounds, we -- our elected representatives in Congress -- cracked down on them in the 1970s.[2] Then in 2001, we -- a few people in the Bush administration -- threw those protections away and told them to have at it, full steam ahead. What followed were a series of resignations, internal protests, and leaks. For people who knew what was going on, it was not business as usual. The first stories about the extent of the new regime started coming out in 2005, four years after it started. If you want to say that you've had a pretty good guess what the NSA was up to since 2005, and the Snowden documents only confirmed your suspicions, that's fine. But you couldn't prove it, and the government flatly denied it. They have shown no compunction about directly lying to us about what they were doing (and, remarkably, they're still trying to). What's different now is that their lies are clear, because the truth is in their own documents. If you're surprised that people were shocked by what the NSA has done since 2001, then either you were born in 2002, or you need to learn more about how and why things changed. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-sec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee