Cryptome has yesterday featured a excerpt from "State of the War : The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" shredding more light on what the NSA used to be before 9/11 and how things changed at a later stage. In case you really want to find out more about the entire history of the NSA, go though "The Quest for Cryptologic Centralization and the Establishment of NSA, 1940-1952", and some of the most remarkable NSA released publication entitled "Eavesdropping on Hell : Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945".
My opinion - With no guards, the gates are always open. But who will watch the watchers when they start watching us?!
Even though, as Marine Corps General Alfred M. Gray have put it years ago "Communications without intelligence is noise, intelligence without communications is irrelevant", and so is privacy in the 21st century, period.
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NSA, intelligence, eavesdropping, CIA