Until now, the NSA had never been in the spotlight

Sep 5, 2013 11:06 GMT  ·  By

As an intelligence agency, the NSA is veiled in secrecy. No one talks about it, no one writes about it and very rarely does any kind of news come from the agency.

However, over the past three months, their Internet ‘popularity’ has skyrocketed, thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks.

According to data gathered by Down Jones over the past 13 years, the NSA coverage has grown like never before over this past summer.

Dow Jones used data from its DJX Factive news archive, which includes 34,000 sources in 28 languages.

This pretty much means that while it may have missed some news outlets, it should still paint a pretty clear picture of the situation.

At its peak, the NSA was mentioned in more than 15,000 articles per month this summer.

The previous high? 2006, when The New York Times revealed George W. Bush had authorized the NSA to perform warrantless surveillance on US citizens.

While the 2006 subject resembles the one making headlines this time around, the hype quickly died out at the time. Now, with the thousands of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA is likely to stay in the news for a long time.

Of course, the coverage of other US governmental agencies doesn’t even come close to that of the NSA and given the fact that they’re not the ones doing the spying at the moment, it’s not hard to understand why.

In early June, The Guardian and The Washington Post published information detailing the PRISM program run by the NSA, which enabled it to tap into the servers of numerous Internet companies, but also the NSA’s phone metadata collection efforts.

Ever since then, the story has grown, with more revelations published every other day regarding the various programs the NSA has at its disposal, but also the targets the NSA has in sight.