http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/07/every-move-you-make-obam
a-nsa-security-surveillance-spying-intelligence-snowden/?
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*Every Move You Make*

*Over eight years, President Barack Obama has created the most intrusive
surveillance apparatus in the world. To what end?*



This summer, at 1:51 p.m. on Saturday, June 11, an unearthly roar shattered
the afternoon quiet along the Florida coast. On Cape Canaveral, liquid fuel
surged through the thick aluminum veins of a Delta IV Heavy rocket nearly
as tall as the U.S. Capitol. Two million pounds of thrust in three
symmetrical boosters fired the engines, sending the craft hurtling over the
Atlantic Ocean into the heavens. Eighty seconds after takeoff, it hit Mach
1, the speed of sound.

The Delta IV Heavy, introduced in 2004, is the most powerful rocket in
American history, and this was only the ninth time it had launched. Even
more exclusive, however, was its top-secret cargo: Inside its nearly
seven-story-high nose cone was an Advanced Orion, the world’s largest
satellite. About eight hours after launch, when the most advanced spy craft
ever built went into geosynchronous orbit, it unfurled its gigantic mesh
antenna, larger than a football field, and began eavesdropping on the Earth
below.

The mission’s patch, dubbed “epic/terrifying” by the *Verge*, depicted a
masked, armored knight standing defensively before an American flag. A
sword strapped to his back bore a cross-guard resembling a set of claws.
According to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the intelligence
agency responsible for the satellite, the image delivered “a message of
tenacious, fierce focus … representing extreme reach with global coverage.”

In a sense, this was a fitting tribute to President Barack Obama as his
administration entered its last six months in the White House. Over his two
terms, Obama has created the most powerful surveillance state the world has
ever seen. Although other leaders may have created more oppressive spying
regimes, none has come close to constructing one of equivalent size,
breadth, cost, and intrusiveness. From 22,300 miles in space, where seven
Advanced Orion crafts now orbit; to a 1-million-square-foot building in the
Utah desert that stores data intercepted from personal phones, emails, and
social media accounts; to taps along the millions of miles of undersea
cables that encircle the Earth like yarn, U.S. surveillance has expanded
exponentially since Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.

The effort to wire the world — or to achieve “extreme reach,” in the NRO’s
parlance — has cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. Obama has
justified the gargantuan expense by arguing that “there are some trade-offs
involved” in keeping the country safe. “I think it’s important to recognize
that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent
privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said in June 2013, shortly after Edward
Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA),
revealed widespread government spying on Americans’ phone calls.

Since Snowden’s leaks, pundits and experts (myself included) have debated
the legality and ethics of the U.S. surveillance apparatus. Yet has the
president’s blueprint for spying succeeded on its own terms? An examination
of the unprecedented architecture reveals that the Obama administration may
only have drowned itself in data. What’s more, in trying to right the ship,
America’s intelligence culture has grown frenzied. Agencies are ever
seeking to get bigger, move faster, and pry deeper to keep pace with the
enormous quantity of information being generated the world over and with
the new tactics and technologies intended to shield it from spies.

This race is a defining feature of Obama’s legacy — and one that threatens
to become never-ending, even after he’s left the White House.

The foundations of Obama’s shadow state date back to the immediate
post-9/11 period. Six weeks after the attacks, the Patriot Act, which
greatly expanded the government’s surveillance powers, was rushed through
Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. A few months later, the
Bush administration created the Information Awareness Office, part of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). That led to the
development of the Total Information Awareness program, designed to vacuum
up vast amounts of private electronic data — banking transactions, travel
documents, medical files, and more — from citizens. After the media exposed
and criticized the program, which didn’t use warrants, Congress shut it
down in late 2003. Much of the operation, though, was simply transferred to
the NSA.

In 2005, the *New York Times* revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to
monitor the international electronic communications “of hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of people in the United States.” Code-named Stellar Wind, the
program intercepted telephone conversations, emails, and metadata from taps
inside AT&T facilities and from satellites. Each day, millions of
communications were scanned for addresses and keywords associated with al
Qaeda. Any leads were sent to the FBI. (A secret internal analysis
conducted by the bureau in 2006 indicated that no information from Stellar
Wind had proved useful.)

The same week the *Times* investigation was published, Obama, then a
senator, gave a speech defending civil liberties and asking the Senate to
hold off on voting to reauthorize the Patriot Act. “If someone wants to
know why their own government has decided to go on a fishing expedition
through every personal record or private document … this legislation gives
people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law,”
the former constitutional law professor declared. “This is just plain
wrong.”

Obama rode a wave of negative public opinion on mass surveillance. In
January 2006, a Zogby Analytics poll showed that, by a margin of 52 to 43
percent, Americans wanted Congress to consider impeaching Bush if he
wiretapped citizens without a judge’s approval. Obama then carried the
opposition narrative into his White House bid. In late 2007, he publicly
promised, “No more secrecy. That’s a commitment that I make to you as
president…. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens.”
He even vowed to support a filibuster of any bill that gave retroactive
immunity to companies providing assistance to government spies. (PRISM, a
secretive program to gather data from major internet companies that was
later revealed in Snowden’s leaks, was launched in 2007.)

Yet as his campaign progressed, Obama’s stance hardened. Overseas, scores
of people were being killed in Iraq by suicide bombings; at home, opponents
were hammering Obama for being weak on terrorism. Amid this shifting
political climate, he brought in John Brennan, a former CIA deputy
director, as his top intelligence advisor. During the Bush years, Brennan
had supported the very policies Obama campaigned against. Within months,
his influence on the candidate was evident. In July 2008, Obama reversed
his earlier promises, announcing support for a sweeping surveillance law
that largely legalized the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program and
granted immunity to telecom companies that aided in spying.

Many of Obama’s supporters were horrified. “I am disgusted,” one wrote on
the candidate’s website. “Obama will NOT receive my vote in November.” But
the Democratic nominee justified his switch by pointing to violent threats
in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “In a dangerous world,”
he wrote on a campaign blog, “government must have the authority to collect
the intelligence we need to protect the American people.” From a pragmatic
perspective, Obama was also heading into the last push for the presidency
and needed to appeal to the broader electorate, which viewed terrorism as a
bigger threat than his liberal base did.

After being elected, Obama staffed up with intelligence officials who
supported mass surveillance. Brennan became his chief counterterrorism
advisor (and, a few years later, director of the CIA). Maureen Baginski,
the NSA’s former director of signals intelligence, a job that had placed
her in charge of wiretapping, joined the transition team that helped
establish policy for the NSA and other spy agencies.

Most notable, though, was Obama’s decision to keep the NSA’s chief in
place. Keith Alexander, a three-star general who’d led the agency since
2005, was a force to be reckoned with. “We jokingly referred to him as
Emperor Alexander — with good cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith
gets,” a former senior CIA official told me. “We would sit back literally
in awe of what he was able to get from Congress, from the White House, and
at the expense of everybody else.” Alexander’s preferred spying method was
blunt. According to a document leaked by Snowden, while visiting Menwith
Hill station, the NSA’s giant listening post in England, in June 2008,
Alexander asked, “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” He
applied this approach in Iraq, pulling intelligence from phone
interceptions, planes, drones, satellites, and other sensors into a
powerful computer analysis system known as the Real Time Regional Gateway.
He also ran the NSA’s massive metadata surveillance program, which involved
secretly keeping track of every phone in the United States: what numbers
were called, from where, and exactly when — billions of communications each
year.

One of the few people with the security clearance to witness Alexander in
action was Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court (FISC). He didn’t like what he saw, particularly that the NSA did not
have “reasonable and articulable suspicion” to justify monitoring some 90
percent of targets in its metadata program. In a January 2009 opinion,
Walton wrote that he was “exceptionally concerned” that the agency was
operating in “flagrant violation” of the FISC’s orders regarding privacy.
Two months later, he accused the NSA of making “material
misrepresentations” to the court, which in less polite language is known as
lying. He pointed the finger at Alexander, writing that the general’s
explanation for why his agency had been eavesdropping illegally on tens of
thousands of Americans — essentially, that he thought privacy restrictions
applied only to certain archived data — “strains credulity.” Walton
concluded that oversight of metadata gathering “has never functioned
effectively.”

Yet Obama didn’t dismiss Alexander. In fact, the following year, the
general was awarded a fourth star and tapped to lead the newly minted,
top-secret U.S. Cyber Command. And rather than limit the NSA chief’s
collect-it-all regime, the president authorized its expansion.

For the Obama administration, the next frontier in spying was being able to
eavesdrop on every single person in a country by obtaining “full-take
audio” of all cell-phone conversations. For this new program, code-named
SOMALGET, it needed a testing ground. The Bahamas — small, contained,
peaceful, 50 miles from the Florida coast — fit the bill.

In 2009, not long after Obama had taken office, the NSA gained access to
Bahamian communications networks by subterfuge. The U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration got legal permission to plant monitoring equipment in the
nation’s telecom systems by convincing the islands’ government that the
operation would help catch drug dealers. Really, though, it opened a
backdoor for the NSA so that it could tap, record, and store cellular data.
“[O]ur covert mission is the provision of SIGINT [signals intelligence],” a
document leaked by Snowden stated. The host country was “not aware.”

Within two years, SOMALGET would achieve its goal of 100 percent
surveillance in the Bahamas — all without legal warrants. This included
spying on the cell phones of some 6 million U.S. citizens who visit or
reside in the country each year; notable celebrities with homes there are
Bill Gates, John Travolta, and Tiger Woods.

The NSA didn’t stop with the Bahamas, however. It eventually deployed
SOMALGET in Afghanistan, which brought the total number of conversations
recorded and stored by the program to “over 100 million call events per
day,” according to leaked agency files. It also began collecting metadata
from phones in the Philippines, Mexico, and Kenya. NSA planning documents
in 2013 anticipated further uses in other countries.

In some cases, the Obama administration cooperated with foreign governments
to expand its reconnaissance capabilities. This included members of the
Five Eyes, a clandestine alliance of intelligence agencies in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that dates
back to the Cold War. During Obama’s first three years in office, the U.S.
government paid the British equivalent of the NSA, the Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), at least $150 million to enhance
surveillance. Because undersea fiber-optic cables from North and South
America transit the United Kingdom on their way to Europe and the Middle
East, the GCHQ was in an ideal position to place taps on them. It did just
that, on cables that could transfer upwards of 21 petabytes of information
daily; this included a large slice of the internet, which could be stored
for three days before being replaced by new data, and some 600 million
“telephone events” every 24 hours. In 2010, not long after becoming
operational, the program grew to be so successful that the GCHQ boasted it
had the “biggest internet access” of any Five Eyes member. “This is a
massive amount of data!” acknowledged an agency PowerPoint later made
public by Snowden. Another leaked document declared, “We are in the golden
age.”

To sift through everything, 250 NSA analysts joined forces with about 300
from the GCHQ. Using computer systems, they searched for data containing
any of 71,000 “selectors,” such as keywords, email addresses, or phone
numbers. Internally, this work was dubbed Mastering of The Internet (MTI).
A leaked 2010 GCHQ document stated, “MTI delivered the next big step in the
access, processing and storage journey.” In a single day, the file
continued, a GCHQ surveillance operation known as Tempora had captured,
stored, and analyzed some 39 billion pieces of information.

*The acceleration of surveillance* required a construction boom of a scale
unprecedented in the history of U.S. intelligence. On March 5, 2012,
Alexander opened what is likely the world’s largest listening post, about
130 miles north of Savannah, Georgia; members of the press were warned not
to bring cameras within two miles. The $286 million, 604,000-square-foot
facility has more than 2,500 workstations and 47 conference rooms, and it
employs more than 4,000 eavesdroppers and other personnel who focus on the
Middle East. Earphones on, facing their computers, employees sit in
cubicles and listen to “cuts,” or intercepted conversations. “It’s very
near real time,” Adrienne Kinne, a former intercept operator at the
complex, told me a few years ago. “We would just get these thousands of
cuts dumped on us … [from] Iraq, Afghanistan, and a whole swath of area. We
would get [calls in] Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, Chinese.”

As of 2013, the NSA had spent upwards of $300 million to expand a former
Sony chip-fabrication plant near San Antonio and turn it into the agency’s
principal listening post for the Caribbean and Central and South America.
About 900 miles northwest, it was also constructing a new operations
building at Buckley Air Force Base near Denver. The mission was to collect
intercepted communications from spy satellites, including Advanced Orions,
and ground stations like Menwith Hill, then transmit the data through
fiber-optic cables to analysts at their desks near Savannah, San Antonio,
and at other NSA outposts. Meanwhile, in January 2012, the NSA opened a
$358 million listening post on the island of Oahu targeting Asian and
Pacific countries. Upon its debut, Alexander said in a news release that
the facility’s goal “is to produce foreign signals intelligence for
decision-makers as global terrorism now jeopardizes the lives of our
citizens, military forces, and international allies.”

Not to be left out, Menwith Hill also underwent a multimillion-dollar
expansion. Like a moon base hidden in the rolling Yorkshire hills, the
station’s 33 giant golf-ball-like radomes house parabolic antennas capable
of 2 million intercepts an hour from communications satellites. To better
analyze data at the post, in 2012, the NSA added powerful supercomputers
and boosted personnel from 1,800 to 2,500.

That November, Obama was re-elected following a campaign that centered
almost exclusively on domestic and economic issues; little attention was
paid to surveillance and privacy. (The Snowden leaks were still more than
six months down the road.) Beyond the campaign trail, however, on high
ground in Bluffdale, Utah, construction was in progress on the pièce de
résistance of Obama’s shadow empire. The $2 billion, 1-million-square-foot
complex was set to function as the centerpiece of the NSA’s global
eavesdropping operations. Into it would flow streams of emails, text
messages, tweets, Google searches, financial records, Facebook posts,
YouTube videos, metadata, and telephone chatter picked up by the
constellation of satellites, cable taps, and listening posts by then in
operation.

For intelligence analysts, the Bluffdale facility serves as a sort of
“cloud,” or external hard drive, for intercepted data. About 200 people
tend to some 10,000 racks of humming, blinking servers containing trillions
of words and thoughts sucked up from unsuspecting people. Some areas of the
complex contain data considered critical, such as calls and emails to and
from key members of al Qaeda and the Islamic State; other information is
eventually erased to make room for more on the servers.

Outside the facility, there’s been the occasional protest. In June 2014, a
bulbous, 135-foot-long blimp appeared in the sky bearing a giant sign that
read, “NSA Illegal Spying Below.” Inside were representatives from a
coalition of grassroots groups dedicated to privacy. “We’re flying an
airship over the Utah data center,” a written statement from one
participating organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, proclaimed,
“which has come to symbolize the NSA’s collect-it-all approach to
surveillance.”

*Although the effort* to gather every possible bit of information follows a
certain logic — the more you have, the more likely you are to find what
you’re looking for — it is complicated by what NSA officials refer to as
the three V’s. “Inside [the] NSA, we often say that’s the volume, velocity,
variety issue,” Alexander’s deputy, Chris Inglis, told an audience of
intelligence officials in 2010, “an enormous quantity of information moving
ever faster and coming at us in very complex forms.”

Obama’s surveillance architecture, it seems, has done little to address
this multifaceted problem. In fact, it may have made it worse. Privacy
hasn’t been traded for security, but for the government hoarding more data
than it knows how to handle. Kinne, the former intercept operator,
described her work as “just like searching blindly through all these cuts
to see what the hell was what.”

In the wake of the Snowden leaks, administration officials tried hard to
justify the secret collection of Americans’ telephone records. “We know of
at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information,”
Obama said during a visit to Berlin in 2013. He offered no specific
examples. Alexander, meanwhile, claimed numerous times to the media and in
public speeches that “54 different terrorist-related activities” had been
thwarted. But he, too, offered no examples.

On Oct. 2, 2013, when called to testify before the Senate Judiciary
Committee, the general backtracked. Alexander cited only one instance when
an intercept detected a potential threat: a Somali taxi driver living in
San Diego who sent $8,500 to al-Shabab, his home country’s notorious
terrorist group. That winter, a panel set up by Obama to review the NSA’s
operations concluded that the agency had stopped no terrorist attacks. “We
found none,” Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and one
of five panel members, bluntly told NBC News in December 2013. Since then,
despite mass surveillance both at home and abroad, shootings or bombings
have occurred in San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; Paris;
Brussels; and Istanbul — to name just a few places.

Beyond failures to create security, there is the matter of misuse or abuse
of U.S. spying, the effects of which extend well beyond violations of
Americans’ constitutional liberties. In 2014, I met with Snowden in Moscow
for a magazine assignment. Over pizza in a hotel room not far from Red
Square, he told me that the NSA puts innocent people in danger. In his
experience, for instance, the agency routinely had passed raw, unredacted
intercepts of millions of phone calls and emails from Arab- and
Palestinian-Americans to its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200. Once in
Israeli hands, Snowden feared, this information might be used to extort
information or otherwise harm relatives of the individuals being spied upon.

That September, after my interview with Snowden was published, 43 members
of Unit 8200 quit their posts in moral protest. They charged publicly that
Israel used intercepted communications, like those sent to it by the NSA,
to inflict “political persecution” on Palestinians. They said data were
gathered on sexual orientations, infidelities, money problems, family
medical conditions, and other private matters and then used as tools of
coercion — to force targets into becoming Israeli collaborators, for
example. “[T]he intelligence is used to apply pressure to people, to make
them cooperate with Israel,” one member of the dissenting group, who asked
that his name not be used, told the *Guardian*.

The NSA has at least considered employing similar tactics in the United
States. In a top-secret memo dated Oct. 3, 2012, Alexander raised the
possibility of using vulnerabilities discovered in mass data — “viewing
sexually explicit material online,” for instance — to damage reputations.
The agency could, say, smear individuals it believed were radicalizing
others in an effort to diminish their influence.

Obama, meanwhile, has taken virtually no steps to fix what ails his spying
apparatus. After the Snowden revelations, the president called for ending
the NSA’s collection of metadata from phone calls by U.S. citizens. But
this represents a rare tremor in the surveillance state. More consistently,
Obama has limited oversight. In his first year as president, he threatened
to veto a bill from his own party that would have required him to brief all
members of congressional intelligence committees about covert operations,
as opposed to the much smaller “Gang of Eight,” made up of top-ranking
party and committee leaders and created in the Bush era to shield illegal
activities from scrutiny. Gang briefings, former White House
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told Rachel Maddow in 2009, were often
a “farce.”

While keeping critics at bay, the Obama administration has gone after
people blowing the whistle on intelligence abuses. The Justice Department
has charged eight leakers — more than double the number under all previous
presidents combined. “[T]his trend line should be going in the opposite
direction,” an ACLU lawyer argued in a 2014 blog post. “The modern national
security state is more powerful than ever — more powerful even than during
the Cold War. It demands democratic accountability.”

*The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)* released a report in
June detailing what it calls a “data tsunami.” By the end of this decade,
there will be anywhere from 50 billion to 200 billion networked devices on
a planet of some 8 billion people. “For the intelligence community, this
equates to 40 zettabytes of data, or 1 sextillion bytes,” the NGA states.
“Described in more familiar terms, this is the equivalent of every person
on the planet having 174 newspapers delivered daily.” Viewed another way,
that’s more data than 7 billion Libraries of Congress could hold.

In the surveillance state Obama has built, this deluge threatens to bury
the few needles that might exist — warnings of attacks, signals of
radicalizing groups, rallying cries of extremist recruiters — even deeper
in the proverbial haystack. So, too, does encryption: Once a tool used
mostly by spy agencies and militaries, encryption is becoming commonplace
in everyday digital chatter to keep government eyes and ears out. Gmail
offers it. WhatsApp began providing its billion-plus users with automatic
encryption in April. In July, Facebook announced that it would soon give
the option of end-to-end encryption on its Messenger app. More services
will surely follow.

Speed is a critical component in breaking encryption because most codes are
based on factoring extremely large prime numbers. Conducting what’s known
as a “brute force” attack — trying every possible combination of digits —
using even the most powerful computers in operation would take centuries or
longer to succeed.

Obama, though, signed an executive order in July 2015 urging the creation
of an exaflop supercomputer — a machine about 30 times faster than anything
in existence. It would be capable of conducting more than a quintillion
(1,000,000,000,000,000,000) operations per second. The president’s charge
to build was mostly targeted at the scientific community; behind the
scenes, however, the NSA has been preparing to breach the exaflop barrier
since 2011.

That year, the agency secretly built a 260,000-square-foot facility at the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the same place where the
Manhattan Project developed the atomic bomb. Its research focuses on
hitting the computing speed that would not only give the agency an edge
over encryption, but also provide it with better cataloging capabilities to
tackle the ocean of data already arriving daily at complexes like the one
in Bluffdale, Utah.

The government is also finding ways to cheat, most notably through Bullrun,
a code-named program run jointly by the NSA and the GCHQ. The agencies
clandestinely collaborate with technology companies and internet service
providers to “insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems,”
as reported by the *Guardian*. As of 2010, according to a top-secret GCHQ
PowerPoint, the NSA had already achieved a breakthrough: “Vast amounts of
encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now
exploitable,” the leaked slides state. By 2015, the British agency hoped to
have cracked the encryption of 15 major internet companies.

Looking further into the future, Obama’s NSA has also explored quantum
computing — technology that, theoretically, could defeat encryption for
good. Its science breaks all the rules. Today, data are stored in binary
bits — either ones or zeros — but in quantum computing, so-called qubits
could be both one and zero at the same time. This would allow for almost
incomprehensible operating speeds. According to documents released by
Snowden, the NSA has been working to build “a cryptologically useful
quantum computer” as part of a research program broadly called Penetrating
Hard Targets.

Ultrafast computing could be a game-changer in U.S. intelligence. It would
break the last line of defense against government intrusion. Though this
wouldn’t necessarily — or even likely — guarantee that security threats
could be identified, it would allow the surveillance state to seize every
bit of power that its backers, including Obama, have sought to give it.

After the White House panel set up to review NSA surveillance in 2013
suggested halting efforts to undermine commercial encryption, the president
demurred. In a speech — one of the few he’s given on surveillance in his
second term — Obama kept to the middle of the political road. “We have to
make some important decisions about how to protect ourselves and sustain
our leadership in the world, while upholding the civil liberties and
privacy protections that our ideals and our Constitution require,” he said.
“We need to do so not only because it is right, but because the challenges
posed by threats like terrorism, and proliferation, and cyberattacks are
not going away anytime soon.”

Zack Whittaker, the security editor for *ZDNet*, summed up Obama’s remarks
in a headline: “Keep calm and carry on spying.”

*Whoever wins the* upcoming presidential election will probably do just
that. In response to the Orlando shooting in June, Hillary Clinton said, “I
have proposed an intelligence surge to bolster our capabilities across the
board with appropriate safeguards here at home” — but offered no details on
what that would entail. She has called for Snowden to return from Russia
and face trial, and while supporting the end of the NSA’s metadata program,
she’s suggested that the agency never broke the law. “I think it’s fair to
say the government, the NSA, didn’t, so far as we know, cross legal lines,
but they came right up and sat on them,” she told an audience at a San
Francisco technology summit in August 2014.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric, meanwhile, suggests that he would prioritize
making America’s surveillance empire as powerful as possible. “I think
security has to preside, and it has to be preeminent,” he told Fox News in
June 2015. Trump has also said NSA reconnaissance is just a fact of modern
American life. “I assume that when I pick up my telephone, people are
listening to my conversations,” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt last
December, implying that Americans should just get used to being spied on.

Whistleblowers, it seems, would not fare well under a Trump administration.
“If I were president, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would give him
over,” Trump said of Snowden in a July 2015 appearance on CNN. In 2013,
speaking on *Fox & Friends*, he was even tougher. “I think Snowden is a
terrible threat. I think he’s a terrible traitor, and you know what we used
to do in the good old days when we were a strong country?” Trump asked.
“You know what we used to do to traitors, right?” One of the hosts
interjected, “Well, you killed them, Donald.” Trump agreed.

This is Obama’s legacy on surveillance: a shadow state of brick and mortar,
hardware and software, satellites and eavesdroppers, that is ready to grow
on the next president’s command. How big is too big, though, is a question
the outgoing president has never answered fully. At what point does
gathering data become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end? Is
the U.S. government already there or approaching it?

Unless answers come, 50 years from now, the world may look back at Obama’s
architecture of surveillance — full of radomes, windowless walls, phone
taps, and double-ringed fences — with the same puzzled astonishment that
1950s bomb shelters elicit today.

*A version of this article originally appeared in the September/October
2016 issue of  *FP *magazine.  *




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