Many years ago, I was a Russian linguist in the US Air Force. I was assigned to work for the National Security Agency. The work I did there, at the height of the Cold War, was fascinating, challenging, and directly linked to our survival as a nation. I was surrounded by extremely talented and motivated people, who came to work every day excited to use the high-tech tools at our disposal to keep our nation safe. We had a Mission.

While the Soviet Union no longer exists, I believe that the current employees at NSA are every bit as enthused about their mission today as we were forty years ago.

We dealt with materials and equipment protected by the highest levels of security. Top Secret is just the beginning of the levels of classification designed to prevent disclosure of the nation’s secrets. My work as a Russian linguist meant that I worked with communications intelligence, or “ComInt” as they called it. ComInt has an associated code word that distinguishes it from other kinds of materials with enhanced classifications, such as nuclear secrets and war plans and human intelligence, each of which would have its own code word. You must have clearance specific to the secrets to which you are given access.

At one point, I was given access to another type of secrets, and had to undergo vetting and additional type of training. I learned that the way that worked was that they would not tell you what you were going to gain access to until you had agreed to keep it secret. You don’t have access until you agree, and you really don’t know what you are agreeing to until after you agree. It is a rather bizarre arrangement, but it makes sense in a way. In my case, it turned out to be intelligence derived from spy satellites, but I didn’t know that until I agreed not to divulge what I learned for twenty years.

I thought about that process for a while, and finally went to my boss and told him that I had no problem with anything that I was currently being asked to do, which was essentially to transcribe what Russian pilots said over their radios to each other and to their ground controllers.

I told him that I would have a problem if I were asked to transcribe Russian telephone calls. I explained that my problem was not with the practice itself, but with developing the ability to do so. I reasoned that if we started listening in on Russian telephone calls, we would be establishing systems and protocols for listening in on anyone’s telephone calls, and that in the future, that technical expertise could be used by the government against American citizens. I did not want anything to do with developing that capability.

You probably cannot imagine the consternation that caused to the powers that be within the National Security Agency. I very nearly lost my job and my security clearance. I was subjected to numerous polygraph tests and questioned at length by some very important-looking and serious people. But there was no other way for me to avoid a nasty situation, should someone decide to get me a clearance for Russian phone tapping. I wouldn’t know about it until it was too late.

Over the years, I have read numerous open-source discussions of our ability to listen to Russian phone calls. Apparently we were, in the early 1970’s, capable of monitoring every phone call made in the USSR. We knew the originating and answering phone number, and often the name of the person on each end. Even then NSA had speech-recognition software that listened for specific key-words and flagged calls in which those words were used, and calls to or from specific numbers were also flagged; all flagged calls were transcribed by humans. I like to think that my boss was listening to Leonid Brezhnev, dictator of the Soviet Union, when I interrupted him; because our work was compartmentalized, I have no idea what he actually did. I had no need to know.

I say all this in all humility; I have no sense of “Mother pin a rose on me” for my incredible foresightedness. Rather the opposite: If it was obvious to lowly me, 40 years ago, that listening to people’s phone calls would lead the National Security Agency into disrepute for listening to Americans’ phone calls, and undermine the legitimacy of our government for unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of American citizens, it should have been apparent to people at much higher levels than I. It should have been apparent to our elected representatives in Congress.

NSA has databases of our communications and searches through them for evidence of threats to our security. I just wonder, what top secret codeword applies to the information sought from our private conversations by people in other agencies who gain access to the records gathered by NSA?

What kinds of things do they seek, and to what use do they put the information?

When the National Security Agency collects ALL the communications in the entire country, that includes all the phone calls and emails sent by the staff of the Mitt Romney campaign, the Republican National Committee, and all the other candidates in all the other races. You will never convince me that once those communications were collected, there wasn’t someone in the Obama administration who thought it would be interesting to find out what those staffers and candidates were talking about.

Nixon eavesdropped on one phone in the DNC. Obama eavesdropped on all the candidates, all the fundraisers, all the volunteers.

We need to slam the door hard on this kind of invasion of privacy. If a government agent wants to eavesdrop on an American citizen, he should get a warrant from a judge citing probable cause; if he proceeds without a warrant, he should face felony charges. I think that is the current law, and I think it needs to be enforced.

The mass collection of communications by the government included the phone calls and emails to and from the Fed, the corporations, and the SEC. Human nature is such that it is almost unthinkable that someone who had access to this treasure trove of information did not use it to enrich themselves through insider trading, blackmail, or other misuse.

I am sure that access to these intercepts was intended to be extremely limited, but there had to be a large number of people who ended up with some sort of access. Among such a group of people, there was most assuredly someone who either had access or knew someone with access and managed to profit from it.

This must not be allowed to continue. We must insist that this warrantless intrusion into our lives be ended, and those who authorized it and implemented it must be criminally charged.

Given a sufficiently large sample of anyone’s voice, modern technology allows the synthesis of conversations. This brings another troubling aspect of the NSA surveillance; it is now possible to manufacture a phone conversation that never occurred. How can prosecutors now bring cases based on court-sanctioned wiretaps, if it is no longer possible to authenticate the conversation? The investigators who listened in on the conversation cannot prove that someone else was not feeding them synthesized speech. A digital feed would be indistinguishable from a live exchange. It would include the mannerisms and speech patterns and syntax that characterize the voices of both parties to the call.

A valuable law enforcement tool falls victim to the desire to find and apprehend people before they commit an act of terror. I simply find the universal collection of all communication to be so incompatible with freedom and the operation of a constitutional republic that it threatens every foundation that underpins our nation. And the real shame is that all that effort did not disclose the actual perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing, nor the Fort Hood shootings, nor even Sandy Hook. It failed.

Anyone who has listened to the admissions of the IRS cannot deny the reality of abuse of the system by individuals who would use the machinery of government for purposes that were never intended, in the service of their political or financial goals. To think the National Security Agency is immune to such abuse is to live in a dream world, so divorced from reality that it approaches insanity.

What of Edward Snowden? He has been the focus of news reports about the NSA role in collecting all electronic communication among American citizens. WHY?

I don’t care about Snowden. I care about the government intrusion into the lives of the citizens, whether through monitoring their financial affairs, their medical records, or their political organizations. This is the issue that no one seems to wish to pursue, and Snowden gave up his career and likely his life to inform us. While I don’t know anything about Snowden or the extent and content of the leaks he is responsible for, we should at least honor his revelation that the government is trampling upon our rights.

As to the question of whether the NSA programs prevented terrorist attacks, let us examine the failures that occurred during their regime of warrantless intercept. There was a Moslem psychiatrist who was a major in the US Army, and who attracted the concern of his fellow doctors. He reportedly entered into significant electronic communication with known foreign extremist Islamofascists. Did anyone in Homeland Security, the Army, NSA, or anyone else with responsibility for the safety of American citizens find it necessary to sort through the massive database of stored communications to see what he had to say? Did the voice recognition software bring him to the attention of the NSA analysts? No, he was allowed to continue his erratic behavior until he shot dozens of fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. If they were unable to use their communications intercept to identify and apprehend him before he attacked, I think it is quite reasonable to think they simply were not looking for Islamofascist threats.

And there were two Moslem brothers, who communicated and travelled and trolled the internet in furtherance of their plot to bomb the spectators at the Boston Marathon. The Russian government officially warned our government about them. If NSA was unable to use their communication intercept threat assessment software to identify and apprehend them before they attacked, I think it is quite reasonable to think they simply were not looking for Islamofascist threats.

In fact, in both these instances, there was sufficient warning from outside sources to allow for a normal investigation from a normal (non-FISA) court; the NSA “heads-up” warning from their data collection could have been easily masked to protect the source.

Therefore, we can only conclude that this mammoth violation of our fourth amendment, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” cannot guarantee our safety. It can only subvert our liberty.

Many years ago, the National Security Agency intercepted virtually all the phone calls placed in the Soviet Union. What intelligence did they derive? They doubtless heard endless complaints from Politboro members about their domestic help, about the troublesome mistresses, their ungrateful families, their greedy relatives, their incompetent drivers. What they heard little of was military information or strategic planning. They knew they were being listened to by their own security forces. Those with loose lips were culled from the herd before they became important enough to know anything of value.

There can be no doubt that Islamofascist terrorists have known for many years that their phone calls were being intercepted. Bin Laden used couriers because of that knowledge. Snowden did not alert the terrorists to the fact they were subjects of communications intercepts; they have long known that. The fact that home-grown terrorists were able to communicate freely in spite of the American government’s programs to monitor those communications and identify terrorists should tell us that the government programs simply were not looking for Islamofascist terrorists.

So what were they looking for?