Enemies Of The State

Salon has an unsurprising but alarming article about the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and its new working relationship with the NSA. Basically, the NGA looks while the NSA listens—and both are now doing an unknown amount of this domestically. (Even less is known about the NTA, the National Touching & Tasting Agency.)

Little jokes aside, this actually isn't funny. As Frank Church, then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, famously said in the mid-seventies:

[The government's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.

ALSO: While Salon calls the NGA "relatively unknown to the public," it's not unknown to me because my father used to work there, back when it was called the Defense Mapping Agency. In fact, before I was born my parents and sister lived across the street from them, and I went to kindergarten right next door. The buildings there didn't have any windows, to prevent the sneaky Russians from seeing in and stealing all our mapping secrets.

I'm pleased to say my father quit when he was assigned to map cities in the Soviet Union so they could be more effectively targeted with nuclear weapons. This made a big impression on me when I was six.

AND: Let's turn the tables on the NGA and look down on them from space: