I grew up in northen virginia in the early '70's...Ft Meade's function was well known to high school students...based on my experience the intelligence community leaked like a sieve...at least as far as children of government employee's was concerned. Maybe things have tightened up since then.

I believe that it will eventually come out that one of the reasons Bush circumvented the FISA courts will be that the NSA has developed technological advances in datamining of some sort or another. Bush probably wanted to expand the use of these new capabilities in a way that would be severely impeded by the current approval process (not to mention my suspicion that he also wanted to target political/ideological opponents and groups), and so he went ahead and told them to do it sans-warrants. I'm sure this new technology will become a component to the White House's defense in the court of public opinion. Hopefully enough people in the media and Congress will point out that Bush should have appealed to Congress to rewrite the laws to accomodate any technological advances and still maintain the NSA and FISA's established levels of accountability.

I find it incredible that Bamford belived that the NSA was working within the law simply because his internal sources said so. Did he seriously expect them to come clean and admit that they were engaged in illegal acts? what planent is he on? Shades of the Woodword syndrome: a former star reporter gets co-opted by the establishment and spins their lies for a fat paycheck. And he has the nerve to act shocked now. He should take a look at Seymour Hersh to see what real investigative journalism is.

Mr.Bamford's outrage is as phoney as his Graham Greene trenchcoat. His credibility as a reporter rivals that of Judith Miller. What kind of a rube says that he pals around with professional liars and snoops for 25 years, and is then surprised when an impeachable President shoves an "I spy" fait accompli in America's face and says, "so what!"?

On the other hand, if Bamford is the ingenue he claims he is , it's time big spy guy came in from the cold and ditched the trench coat.

Actually, Robert Hanssen worked for the FBI, not the CIA.

Can anyone compare/contrast Mr. Bamford with Carla Emery?

I thought this was a great article, and informative. My only quibble was that it said Robert Hanssen was a CIA agent that gave fed secrets to the KGB. Hanssen was FBI. That quibble aside, kudos to Michael Scherer for writing so well about the people who do not like to be written about.

I was disappointed that Mr. Scherer made no mention of Bamford's 2004 book, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies. Surely it belongs in a discussion of Mr. Bamford's work with regard to the NSA.

Where and when do we go next? What member of Congress is calling for hearings and when...soon? I, citizen Edgington, want answers immediately before Rove and Co.'s campaign to spin my right to privacy and liberty into la la land. Some congressman or journalist must demand that law schools react and respond that our Constitutiional guarantees are inviolate and not to be thwarted or 'disemboweled'.

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I hope the public's response will be to demand that cryptographic capabilities be written into our software, browsers, and cell phones. Of course, any widely distributed crypto will be broken/compromised by the NSA. It will be up to the mathematically brightest civil libertarians to provide us commoners with crypto, so we can enjoy the privacy promised us in the law. (I wouldn't trust Microsoft to do it.)

Most people don't seem to be aware of this, but almost everyone in America is now being spied on routinely by their local police and their local power company, in order to detect the power consumption that would indicate an indoor marijuana growing operation.

Since this escalation of the War on Pot can be blamed more on CLinton than on Bush, I guess it doesn't count as an outrageous violation of privacy at Salon.

But it still has dire consequences, like the family earlier this year that was woken up by a SWAT team busting down their front door after getting a warrant from a local judge based on their power consumption records.

They weren't pot growers, they were just an energy-inefficient family, treated to the trauma of a fully blown paramilitary operation in their home because their washing machine was an electricity hog.

Most of you are being spied on like this right now without your consent or knowledge.

So be careful how much electricity you use, if you don't want some SWAT team busting down your door with flash grenades and ordering your whole family on the floor with your hands over your head some morning at 4 am.

There is barely a right to privacy left in this country. I don't know if we can ever climb back up the slope we've slid down.

If I accurately recall the basic premise of the book *Chatter*, than we were all subject to electronic surveillance of one kind or another prior to Bush's circumventing of FISA regulations. It is posited in *Chatter* that our international partners and allies, folks such as the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc. coordinate with us to monitor within our own boarders by working with internal forces (i.e. the NSA) external forces who are listening in on us, and we return the compliment. How this surveillance actually occurs, and with what level of exhuastive precision, are questions that are hard to answer, but we should expect that everything you say over a telephone, fax, write over email, etc. is analyzed for whatever information or patterns they seek. Of course, who knows how long it takes for bits of interesting information to reach a human eye, and then how long it takes to analyze that information within certain contexts and constraints. We can also still assume (I hope) that beyond actual terrorists or those with ties, such information is essentially similar to information harvested from illegal searches and whatnot, and not useful. Of course, if there is a sudden uptic in "anonymous tips" leadings to all sorts of arrests some day soon, then we're in real trouble. The camps will soon be here...