14 DAY TRIAL // Did anyone have any doubt that the NSA dreamt big? Well, a newly leaked document from the Snowden stash sets things straight – the NSA wanted to assert itself as the global leader in clandestine surveillance.
According to a new document published by the New York Times, the intelligence agency wanted to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.” Its 2012 mission statement confirms something that’s actually been pretty obvious over the past months, namely that they wanted to be able to trace “anyone, anywhere, anytime.”
The NSA’s four-year plan was to turn the world into the golden age of SIGINT, as in signals intelligence – to make everything easy to trace.
“The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on NSA’s mission,” the document reveals.
The intelligence agency wanted to be able to use technical and human intelligence gathering methods, seeking to revolutionize data collection by influencing “global commercial encryption market” through commercial relationships.
This makes it once more obvious that the NSA truly wanted to create backdoors for itself anywhere and everywhere.
The NSA responded to the publication of its mission statement. “NSA’s SIGINT strategy is designed to guide investments in future capabilities and close gaps in current capabilities. In an ever-changing technology and telecommunications environment, NSA tries to get in front of the issues to better fulfill the foreign-intelligence requirements of the US government,” they said in their usual manner.
It wasn’t too long ago that the inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was heavily criticizing the United States and the United Kingdom for their efforts to break encryption and to kill off any type of privacy when it comes to online users.