NSA insider John Schindler wrote a compelling essay about his Dad, also a career NSA employee. Here’s the heart of the piece, but I urge you to read all of it.
By the early 1970s dad was assigned to new NSA missions, a career-broadening move. This got him exposure to new Agency programs, far beyond Southeast Asia, some of which deeply disturbed him. He was “read on” for two programs in particular that would soon become infamous. One was MINARET, the monitoring of thousands of domestic dissidents. The other was SHAMROCK, a huge program going back to the Second World War that sucked up telexes going in and out of the United States in a hunt, rather fishing expedition, for spies and subversives, averaging some 150,000 intercepts per month.
Dad was no lawyer, but he knew his 4th Amendment, and he raised holy hell. Part of this, no doubt, stemmed from his deep loathing for then-President Richard Nixon. Growing up in my house, the belief that Nixon was pretty much the human manifestation of evil was hard to miss; to dad, he was always “Tricky Dick,” the bastard who slimed Helen Gahagan Douglas. (As part of his rich, twisted sense of mocking humor – dad was a hipster before his time – he wrote “Tricky Dick” on his helmet in Vietnam; that helmet, complete with shrapnel dent, proudly sits in my office at the Naval War College today.) Like a lot of progressives, dad deep down thought LBJ was in some ways worse than Nixon, since Johnson pretended to be a liberal while not really acting like one, but the idea of NSA’s enormous power to monitor the American people in the hands of Tricky Dick was simply unacceptable to my father. That, my friends, was a hill he was prepared to die on.
His initial complaints “up the chain” were brushed off as the ravings of an unpatriotic madman. But dad didn’t give up. He kept complaining through TS/SCI channels that MINARET and SHAMROCK were illegal and wrong. Soon he became an irritant that senior Agency officials could no longer ignore. What really scared top NSA leadership was the fact that dad had friends in the media, thanks to his studies and time in Southeast Asia, and he made no secret of the fact that, if he could get no remedy internally, he would go to the press. This was the era of Dan Ellsberg and public whistleblowing was in its exciting infancy.
Fortunately Agency leadership was having its own doubts about MINARET and SHAMROCK, sensing that they no longer passed the “smell test” of what looked acceptable even in TS/SCI channels.
Read the rest here.