I don't find it surprising, just interesting.
"... I remember from back in the '70s, the NSA is not supposed to be doing domestic spying, so what were they doing in an AT&T company office? It struck me as odd, but I didn't know anything more about it, so I just let it lie and waited for the guy to come.
Sometime later, maybe a few weeks -- I don't remember exactly -- he did show up. This NSA representative showed up at the door. I happened to be the one who opened the door. I let him in. I directed him to the appropriate people. He was very closemouthed and unsmiling, and he did his business. ... I didn't hear anything about it for a while, and I thought, well, that was over and I'll probably never hear anything about it again. So I never kept the e-mail. I thought it was just routine e-mail, and I'd never hear about it again. That whole incident probably took place in, I think it was the summer of 2002.
Then in the fall we started hearing these stories. ... We'd start talking to those guys over there at Folsom Street, and we'd hear stories coming back, because the field support guys, they would work at several offices. The guy that the NSA had interviewed [at our office on Geary Street] we heard was working on something over at Folsom Street. And I heard from our manager, Don, that he's working on some new room that's being built -- not Don; I mean the other guy. And so people start speculating: Now, what's this new room being built?
At the same time I started getting more suspicious about it. This was around the end of 2002. You might recall there was a big blowup in the news about the Total Information Awareness [TIA] program, led by Adm. [John] Poindexter, which caused the big upsetness in Congress, because what Poindexter was proposing to do was draw in databases from everywhere -- and this was in The New York Times -- draw in Internet data, bank records, travel records, everything into one big conglomeration which could be searchable by the government so they could find out everything about what anybody's doing at any time of day. And all this would be done without any warrants. ..."
Links:
- Spying On The Home Front in Frontline
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