Why We Need an Invasive NSA

Ever since stories about the National Security Agency’s electronic intelligence-gathering capabilities began tumbling out last June, The New York Times has published more than a dozen editorials excoriating the “national surveillance state.” It wants the NSA to end the “mass warehousing of everyone’s data” and the use of “back doors” to break encrypted communications. A major element of the Times’ critique is that the NSA’s domestic sweeps are not justified by the terrorist threat they aim to prevent.

At the end of August, in the midst of the Times’ assault on the NSA, the newspaper suffered what it described as a “malicious external attack” on its domain name registrar at the hands of the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of hackers who support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The paper’s website was down for several hours and, for some people, much longer. “In terms of the sophistication of the attack, this is a big deal,” said Marc Frons, the Times’ chief information officer. Ten months earlier, hackers stole the corporate passwords for every employee at the Times, accessed the computers of 53 employees, and breached the email accounts of two reporters who cover China. Read more...