In a sense, this was a fitting tribute to President Barack Obama as his administration entered its last six months in the White House. Over his two terms, Obama has created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen. Although other leaders may have created more oppressive spying regimes, none has come close to constructing one of equivalent size, breadth, cost, and intrusiveness. From 22,300 miles in space, where seven Advanced Orion crafts now orbit; to a 1-million-square-foot building in the Utah desert that stores data intercepted from personal phones, emails, and social media accounts; to taps along the millions of miles of undersea cables that encircle the Earth like yarn, U.S. surveillance has expanded exponentially since Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.
The effort to wire the world — or to achieve “extreme reach,” in the NRO’s parlance — has cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. Obama has justified the gargantuan expense by arguing that “there are some trade-offs involved” in keeping the country safe. “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said in June 2013, shortly after Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed widespread government spying on Americans’ phone calls. [...]
The foundations of Obama’s shadow state date back to the immediate post-9/11 period. Six weeks after the attacks, the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the government’s surveillance powers, was rushed through Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. A few months later, the Bush administration created the Information Awareness Office, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). That led to the development of the Total Information Awareness program, designed to vacuum up vast amounts of private electronic data — banking transactions, travel documents, medical files, and more — from citizens. After the media exposed and criticized the program, which didn’t use warrants, Congress shut it down in late 2003. Much of the operation, though, was simply transferred to the NSA. [...]
On Oct. 2, 2013, when called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the general backtracked. Alexander cited only one instance when an intercept detected a potential threat: a Somali taxi driver living in San Diego who sent $8,500 to al-Shabab, his home country’s notorious terrorist group. That winter, a panel set up by Obama to review the NSA’s operations concluded that the agency had stopped no terrorist attacks. “We found none,” Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and one of five panel members, bluntly told NBC News in December 2013. Since then, despite mass surveillance both at home and abroad, shootings or bombings have occurred in San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; Paris; Brussels; and Istanbul — to name just a few places.
Beyond failures to create security, there is the matter of misuse or abuse of U.S. spying, the effects of which extend well beyond violations of Americans’ constitutional liberties. In 2014, I met with Snowden in Moscow for a magazine assignment. Over pizza in a hotel room not far from Red Square, he told me that the NSA puts innocent people in danger. In his experience, for instance, the agency routinely had passed raw, unredacted intercepts of millions of phone calls and emails from Arab- and Palestinian-Americans to its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200. Once in Israeli hands, Snowden feared, this information might be used to extort information or otherwise harm relatives of the individuals being spied upon.
