The first and, until recently, most spectacular round of surveillance came during World War I and its aftermath. Fearing subversion by German-Americans after the declaration of war on Germany in 1917, the FBI and Military Intelligence swelled from bureaucratic nonentities into all-powerful agencies charged with extirpating any flicker of disloyalty anywhere in America, whether by word or deed. Since only 9% of the country's population then had telephones, monitoring the loyalties of some 10 million German-Americans proved incredibly labor-intensive, requiring legions of postal workers to physically examine some 30 million first-class letters and 350,000 badge-carrying vigilantes to perform shoe-leather snooping on immigrants, unions, and socialists of every sort. During the 1920s, Republican conservatives, appalled by this threat to privacy, slowly began to curtail Washington's security apparatus. This change culminated in Secretary of State Henry Stimson's abolition of the government's cryptography unit in 1929 with his memorable admonition, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
In the next round of mass surveillance during World War II, the FBI discovered that the wiretapping of telephones produced an unanticipated byproduct with extraordinary potential for garnering political power: scandal. To block enemy espionage, President Franklin Roosevelt gave the FBI control over all U.S. counterintelligence and, in May 1940, authorized its director, J. Edgar Hoover, to engage in wiretapping.
What made Hoover a Washington powerhouse was the telephone. With 20% of the country and the entire political elite by now owning phones, FBI wiretaps at local switchboards could readily monitor conversations by both suspected subversives and the president's domestic enemies, particularly leaders of the isolationist movement such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and Senator Burton Wheeler.
Even with these centralized communications, however, the Bureau still needed massive manpower for its wartime counterintelligence. Its staff soared from just 650 in 1924 to 13,000 by 1943. Upon taking office on Roosevelt's death in early 1945, Harry Truman soon learned the extraordinary extent of FBI surveillance. "We want no Gestapo or Secret Police," Truman wrote in his diary that May. "FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail."
After a quarter of a century of warrantless wiretaps, Hoover built up a veritable archive of sexual preferences among America's powerful and used it to shape the direction of U.S. politics. He distributed a dossier on Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson's alleged homosexuality to assure his defeat in the 1952 presidential elections, circulated audio tapes of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s philandering, and monitored President Kennedy's affair with mafia mistress Judith Exner. And these are just a small sampling of Hoover's uses of scandal to keep the Washington power elite under his influence.
"The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator," recalled William Sullivan, the FBI's chief of domestic intelligence during the 1960s, "he'd send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we're in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter...' From that time on, the senator's right in his pocket." After his death, an official tally found Hoover had 883 such files on senators and 722 more on congressmen.
Armed with such sensitive information, Hoover gained the unchecked power to dictate the country's direction and launch programs of his choosing, including the FBI's notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that illegally harassed the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements with black propaganda, break-ins, and agent provocateur-style violence.
At the end of the Vietnam War, Senator Frank Church headed a committee that investigated these excesses. "The intent of COINTELPRO," recalled one aide to the Church investigation, "was to destroy lives and ruin reputations." These findings prompted the formation, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, of "FISA courts" to issue warrants for all future national security wiretaps.
Surveillance in the Age of the Internet
Looking for new weapons to fight terrorism after 9/11, Washington turned to electronic surveillance, which has since become integral to its strategy for exercising global power.
In October 2001, not satisfied with the sweeping and extraordinary powers of the newly passed Patriot Act, President Bush ordered the National Security Agency to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the nation's telephone companies without the requisite FISA warrants. Somewhat later, the agency began sweeping the Internet for emails, financial data, and voice messaging on the tenuous theory that such "metadata" was "not constitutionally protected." In effect, by penetrating the Internet for text and the parallel Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for voice, the NSA had gained access to much of the world's telecommunications. By the end of Bush's term in 2008, Congress had enacted laws that not only retrospectively legalized these illegal programs, but also prepared the way for NSA surveillance to grow unchecked.
Rather than restrain the agency, President Obama oversaw the expansion of its operations in ways remarkable for both the sheer scale of the billions of messages collected globally and for the selective monitoring of world leaders.
What made the NSA so powerful was, of course, the Internet -- that global grid of fiber optic cables that now connects 40% of all humanity. By the time Obama took office, the agency had finally harnessed the power of modern telecommunications for near-perfect surveillance. It was capable of both blanketing the globe and targeting specific individuals. It had assembled the requisite technological tool-kit -- specifically, access points to collect data, computer codes to break encryption, data farms to store its massive digital harvest, and supercomputers for nanosecond processing of what it was engorging itself on.
By 2012, the centralization via digitization of all voice, video, textual, and financial communications into a worldwide network of fiber optic cables allowed the NSA to monitor the globe by penetrating just 190 data hubs -- an extraordinary economy of force for both political surveillance and cyberwarfare.
With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany's Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far.
After all, once FBI agents had tapped thousands of phones, stenographers had typed up countless transcripts, and clerks had stored this salacious paper harvest in floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, J. Edgar Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C. To gain the same intimate detail for an entire country, the Stasi had to employ one police informer for every six East Germans -- an unsustainable allocation of human resources. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA's technology to the Internet's data hubs now allows the agency's 37,000 employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet.
A Dream as Old as Ancient Rome
In the Obama years, the first signs have appeared that NSA surveillance will use the information gathered to traffic in scandal, much as Hoover's FBI once did. In September 2013, the New York Times reported that the NSA has, since 2010, applied sophisticated software to create "social network diagrams..., unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible..., and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist's office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner."
Through the expenditure of $250 million annually under its Sigint Enabling Project, the NSA has stealthily penetrated all encryption designed to protect privacy. "In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs," reads a 2007 NSA document. "It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace."
