I am rereading The Fifth Horseman by Larry Collins this week; it is about Libyia putting a hydrogen bomb in NYC.
On page 133 of a 470 page book:
"A few miles away at Fort Meade, Maryland, some of the twenty thousand employees of the National Security Agency skimmed through the most complex and sophisticated computer facilities in the world. Stored on them were the harvest of the NSA's world-wide eavesdropping systems, global electronic vacuum cleaners that scooped rations transmissions and telephone calls from the atmosphere, broek them down into key categories for rapid retrieval, then dumped them onto the NSA's computer. The information stored there had already allowed the NSA to foil a major terrorist operation on United States soil. Now the heirs to cryptologists who had broken Japan's naval code in World War II hunted for the word, the phrase, the message that would allow the FBI to foil this one."
Copyright on this book? 1980!
How could they NOT know what has been going on for years????
I know - it is highly disturbing. I worked in the crypto industry for a few years and started way back by reading "The Puzzle Palace" by James Bramford to see what I could learn of NSA as publicly known. This book was copyrighted in 1982. The current release of NSA secrets to the NYT is TREASON and there is nothing to debate. I can only hope the DOJ will follow through and not assign it to a bunch of Toon RATS to investigate. House cleaning is needed all through the Intelligence Agencies. They need to have the loyalty the Military establishes in its ranks. I don't know why Bush is encouraging the investigation of NSA and its operations? They have an IG, the DOD has an IG - that ought to be sufficient. They have counsel and know the laws intimately - I worked with NSA's attorneys.
It was public testimony in the 1970's. See Jabara case and various others, as well as fairly detailed Senate testimony in that era.