Writing about the National Security Agency myths is a tough task because the rules are always changing and whole agency is shrouded in secrecythough in the case of the latter, a good deal less than it once was, thanks in part to its empowerment after 9/11, and because of revelations by Edward Snowden. Anecdotally, when I was in high school (very pre-9/11), I wanted to write a report on the NSA, and when I asked the librarian about it, he ridiculed me, saying scornfully that the NSA was a fake spy agency on TV, and that it didnt exist in real life. I think the NSA would have approved, but any organization that secret is bound to gather a few urban legends along the way. Here are five myths about the National Security Agency.

Compared to the Central Intelligence Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency, no, the NSA doesnt have that many field agents. Most of its thirty thousand or so employees work at Ft. Meade, MD. (There are 18,000 parking spaces at its headquarters, and enough office space that four U.S. Capitols could fit inside of it.) Still, the agency does have men and women who work in the field. They belong to the NSAs Special Collection Service, a group of signals intelligence spies who work jointly with the CIA abroad to penetrate foreign communications networks.

Because the SCS is so secretive, what, precisely they do in the field is likely a moving target. When a hard drive needs to be stolen, that assignment is probably going to go to the CIAs National Clandestine Service. But things like plugging into embassies overseas, planting antennas to intercept communications, and using state-of-the-art technology in the field to acquire signals are almost certainly jobs for the SCS. Though techniques and procedures change, as of a few years ago, small teams called Special Collection Elements, made up of two-to-five members of the Special Collection Service and National Clandestine Service, rotated into foreign embassies and operated abroad under the guise of business persons.

As a matter of technology, yes, most likely. And if you encrypt your messages, it can hang onto those emails forever, or until the encryption is cracked (see below). NSA software is integrated tightly with telecommunications switches for AT&T and, most likely, other such companies. When the companies arent knowingly doing the integration, the NSA does the integration themselves, surreptitiously intercepting routers to targeted facilities and implanting surveillance devices and firmware.

But legally, the NSA needs a lot more than simple ability if they want to start reading your letters to grandma. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to surveil non-U.S. persons abroad. Each year, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submit certifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court stating the types of intelligence they would like to collect, and the way they will do it that is consistent with the law (i.e., heres how we will make sure we dont target Americans). Once the certifications are approved, the government goes to industry and compels them to assist with the surveillance. The court reviews these certifications annually.

Thats the basic legal process at work. In practice, if a non-U.S. person abroad fits the certified surveillance standard (e.g. he likes to make bombs for ISIS), and his communications are found to have foreign intelligence (e.g. hes corresponding with ISIS about where to send the bombs), his communications can be collected.

So if he happens to email yousay hes a fan of Game of Thrones, and you begin a robust correspondence on that seriess awful endingthen your email can only be searched in pursuit of foreign intelligence information, or, if the FBI gets involved looking for evidence of a crime. Only the attorney general can authorize the use of information collected under Section 702 in criminal proceedings against U.S. persons.

The upshot is that the NSA doesnt just type bomb into SpyGoogle and start vacuuming up anyones emails describing Solo: A Star Wars Story. (Which was mostly a pretty good movie, but dont get me started on The Force Awakens.) The whole thing is monitored by the court, senior analysts at the agency, and the Department of Justice.

Under Presidential Policy Directive 28 and its supplemental guidelines, information gathered from the bulk collection of non-U.S. person data must be related to foreign espionage, terrorism, threats to U.S. military forces, cyber warfare, and transnational criminal threats. In other words, if Cuervo Jones of Guadalajara is caught in the net, but isnt doing evil, his communications arent being used against him for other purposes. Moreover, information collected can only be held for five years. If, however, Cuervo has encrypted his correspondence, that can be held indefinitely. Its worth noting that the NSA is not allowed to collect trade secrets from foreign companies in order to give U.S. firms a competitive advantage.

Pretty Good Privacy is a popular encryption standard that uses hashing, compression, and public and private keys for encryption and authentication. (ClearanceJobs previously described how hashing works here.) As of 2014, leaked documents reveal that the NSA was unable to break PGP. A lot has changed in five years, and look, anything is possible, but not that much. As the PGP frequently asked questions document states for a PGP 128-bit encryption: Lets say that you had developed a special purpose chip that could try a billion keys per second. This is far beyond anything that could really be developed today. Lets also say that you could afford to throw a billion such chips at the problem at the same time. It would still require over 10,000,000,000,000 years to try all of the possible 128 bit keys. That is something like a thousand times the age of the known universe!

Well maybe. But probably not. Under Section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA is allowed to build contact chains of telecommunications metadata. Not the calls/emails/etc. themselvesbut call detail recordsinformation about the contact in question. This year, the NSA stated that it has ended the CDR program. In the old days of building those CDR chains, however, the agency used a method called hops. If I am John Terrorist and I appear on the NSAs radar, the agency can use my call detail records to start looking at the people I call (hop one), and the people they call (hop two). So if I call 10 people, those ten people are now in the NSAs metadata surveillance crosshairs. Moreover, the people those ten people call are now in the NSAs web of watchers as well. If each of those people contacted ten people, youve now got 101 people being monitored. The NSA is limited to two hops, though previously could go out as far as three hops, which meant that one person could lead to the monitoring of 1001.

So is the NSA spying on you? Even if the agency has secretly restarted the program, its still highly unlikely, though if you were an Uber driver and John Terrorist called you to give you directions, its possible that you might be in the system. And if you hired a local landscaper to mow your lawn, he or she might be in the net as well. There is no way for you to find out, and nothing you can do if you are. But as a matter of numbers, youre probably safe. Last year fewer than ten thousand queries of American communications stemmed from this program.

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5 Myths About the National Security Agency - ClearanceJobs

Photograph Source: Shealah Craighead, The White House Public Domain

The impeachment theater on display today in the House, bracketed by Speaker Nancy Pelosis maudlin reading of Article I of the Constitution, and by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys ludicrous evocation of the Stalin purge trials to characterize the full House vote to establish impeachment rules and procedures, is increasingly looking like the first act of an almost certain impeachment of President Trump.

Unfortunately, if Democrats impeaching Trump on just the effort to extort an investigation of the Bidens by Ukraines government their goal, theyll get their impeachment vote, but it will end up like the Clinton impeachment as a farcical trial in the Senate, perhaps even strengthening President Trump in next years presidential election contest.

The Democrats, that is to say, are following the Republicans disastrous impeachment model, set in 1998-99 when they sought to oust President Clinton over a blow-job in the Oval Office, and ended up making him one of the most popular presidents in the history of the job.

Democrats should be looking instead to the Nixon impeachment, which obtained the desired result removing a criminal president from office without even having to go to a full vote of the House following passage of articles of impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee.

When one looks back at that impeachment effort, it almost seems incredible that Nixon was forced out of office. This was a president, remember, who in 1972 was re-elected to a second term by a landslide 60.7 percent of the popular vote to just 37.5 percent for his Democratic opponent Sen. George McGovern. Nixon won the electoral votes of 49 states, with only Massachusetts going for McGovern.

Congressional investigation into Nixons crimes began with the establishment of the so-called Watergate Committee, headed by Senator Sam Ervin. That committees public hearings into that scandal started on May 17, 1973, just six months after Nixons electoral triumph.

At the time, while Democrats had solid majorities in both houses of Congress, Nixon was still hugely popular, even as the early details of the Watergate break-in and of the cover-up of that tip-of-the-iceberg corruption in the Nixon White House and re-election campaign were starting to come out. At the time of his inauguration, Nixons popularity was at a peak of 67% in a Gallup poll.

By the time the Watergate Committee started its hearings, four months into his second term, his popularity had slumped to the mid-40s, about equal to his disapproval rating. As those hearings continued, his support continued to sink.By October 30, 1973, just short of a year after Nixon won re-election, when the House Judiciary Committee beganinvestigating possible impeachable crimes by the president, his support had slumped to 27 percent. (Contrary to assertions by todays CongressionalRepublicans, who claim that an impeachment must start with a full vote by the House,it wasnt until February 6, 1974, more than three months after its investigations began, that the Judiciary Committee went to the full House for a vote designating it as an Impeachment Committee.)

More importantly, though, even after the empowered Judiciary Committee began its work, and began issuing subpoenas for documents, tapes and testimony, it wasnt until late July that it finally voted out three articles of impeachment. Those articles were for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress, but they each included a number of examples of the presidents impeachable (though perhaps not all criminal) behavior. Along the way, the committee also investigated and considered other impeachable offenses, drawing up but rejecting two other articles of impeachment.

This is important. When talk of impeaching Nixon first began, Republicans were up in arms defending the president, and even many Democrats were nervous and unconvinced. They had, after all, been trounced in the last election, and Nixon had won re-election decisively. But the hearings, with their dramatic testimony from Nixon White House andcampaign staff, both in the Watergate and in the impeachment committees, provided a steady stream of disturbing information and criminality on the part of the president and his acolytes and appointees. It was a process that led to a steady decline in his popular (and Congressional) support until by the time those three impeachment articles were voted for by the Judiciary Committee, his approval ratings were down in the mid-20 percent range. Not surprisingly, those articles won the backing of even some Republicans on the committee.

There was no further action on Nixons impeachment because Republican leaders did some head-counting and went to the president with word that he would be impeached by the full House on those articles, with significant Republican support, and that he would lose a trial in the Senate, after which he would likely be indicted and likely convicted and sentenced to jail for his crimes.

It was an agonizing political process, though also gripping not just for those who wanted Nixon gone, but even for his backers, or former backers among the electorate.

It is precisely this process which Democrats need to copy in pursuing the eminently impeachment-deserving President Donald Trump.

It would be an historic mistake of epic proportions to go after this congenitally criminal and morally appalling president for just one issue one which many Americans who have backed him will readily excuse him for. Indeed Trumps withholding of Congressionally approved military aid to extort a foreign criminal investigation of a potential political opponent pales in comparison Nixons interference with the Vietnam peace talks or Reagans successful effort as a candidate to get Iran to delay release of the US embassy hostages until after the 1980 election, neither of which led to any impeachment hearings.

Thats not to say that Trump is not a uniquely dangerous threat to Constitutional government.

What the now fully empowered House Judiciary Committee needs to do, though, is to significantly expand its hearings to examineall the myriad impeachable crimeswhich this president is known or strongly suspected of having committed. That would include everything from lying to the American public, cheating on his taxes, obstructing justice on myriad occasions, suborning perjury from witnesses, paying bribes, profiting personally from his powers of office, violating election laws, and perhaps rape and assault as well.

The American people need all these impeachable deeds and misbehavior laid bare in all their gory detail over the next six-12 months. Trumps support, currently languishing around 40 percent, will sink as time goes on, as the shameful behavior gets continuous exposure. As the evidence of his crimes mounts, the risk of his ending up in the clink, at least after he leaves office, will grows. Meanwhile, the likelihood of his winning re-election and escaping that fate will fades. The odds will then grow that he will choose the same option that Nixon chose: resignation with a pardon.

I obviously would like to see Trump removed from the White House, either by impeachment and conviction in the Senate, or by resignation. But I also believe, as I did in the case of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, that even if he survives impeachment, it is crucial for US democracy that impeachable crimes be called out for what they are, even if the perpetrator cannot be convicted by the Senate. (It is my contention, for example, that Obama committed serious impeachable crimes such as refusing to prosecute known the war criminals Bush and VP Dick Cheney, as well as violating the First and Fourth Amendments with his expanded use of NSA spying on Americans, as well as his illegal war on Libya. For these actions or non actions, he should have been impeached by the House.)

So far, it looks like the House, under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who single-handedly stymied efforts to impeach G.W. Bush (as well as crushing the sales of my 2006 bookThe Case for Impeachment!) by declaring in May 2006 that impeachment is off the table, is keeping a lid on any widening of the impeachment case against Trump.

If she persists in this wrong-headed strategy, she must take the blame for the disaster that will likely ensue, of a triumphal Trump declaring that he had been cleared by the Senate, and campaigning through next summer and fall against a Democratic Party he will accuse of being obsessed with overturning the results of the last election.

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Democrats Make a Huge Mistake If They Just Focus Impeachment on the Ukraine Scandal - CounterPunch