It was often widely believed the massive NSA snooping as revealed by the Snowden revelations was triggered by the aftermath of 9/11 during the Bush era but it now emerged that it’s the Executive Order 12333 issued and signed by then US President Ronald Reagan in 1981 that paved the leeway to intelligence agencies sweeping up vast quantities of Americans’ data.
This “twelve triple three”, as it’s known within the government circles, offers the underlying framework for the vast collection of metadata – including email contents, social network chats and messaging details to anything that surfs past the Internet on an incidental basis – even when Americans are not specifically targeted as it would be otherwise forbidden under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978
In a May 2014 interview with NBC, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said that he specifically asked his colleagues at the NSA whether an executive order could override existing statutes. (They said it could not.) Snowden’s lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, said her client was specifically “referring to EO 12333”, according to a report by Ars Technica.
“President Ronald Reagan signed EO 12333 within his first year in office, 1981, largely as a response to the perceived weakening of the American intelligence apparatus by his two immediate predecessors, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Later, EO 12333 was amended three times by President George W. Bush between 2003 and 2008,” according to the report.
“Bush’s reasons for strengthening EO 12333 were similar. After the United States faced another existential threat in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Bush—and later President Barack Obama—used EO 12333 to expand American surveillance power.”
And the rest was history.
But let’s not forget Glenn Greenwald said in this recent book No Place To Hide that the personal motto of former NSA chief Keith Alexander was “Collect it all”. Period?
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