The practice of mass surveillance in the United States, which entails the pervasive surveillance of virtually all Americans' communications, dates back to wartime monitoring and censorship of international communications from, to, or which passed through the United States.
After the First and Second World Wars, mass surveillance continued throughout the Cold War period, via programs such as the Black Chamber and Project SHAMROCK. President Harry S. Truman established the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952 for the purposes of collecting, processing, and monitoring intelligence data. The formation of the international UKUSA surveillance agreement of 1946 evolved into the ECHELON collaboration by 1955 of five English-speaking nations, also known as the Five Eyes, and focused on interception of electronic communications, with substantial increases in domestic surveillance capabilities.
The formation and growth of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA institutionalized surveillance used to also silence political dissent, as evidenced by COINTELPRO projects which targeted various organizations and individuals. During the Civil Rights Movement era, many individuals put under surveillance orders were first labelled as integrationists, then deemed subversive, and sometimes suspected to be supportive of the communist model of the United States' rival at the time, the Soviet Union. Other targeted individuals and groups included Native American activists, African American and Chicano liberation movement activists, and anti-war protesters.
When the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI published stolen FBI documents revealing abuse of intelligence programs in 1971, Senator Frank Church began an investigation into the programs that become known as the Church Committee. The committee sought to investigate intelligence abuses throughout the 1970s. Following a report provided by the committee outlining egregious abuse, in 1976 Congress established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It would later be joined by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978. The institutions worked to limit the power of the agencies, ensuring that surveillance activities remained within the rule of law.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, domestic and international mass surveillance capabilities grew immensely. Congress passed the Patriot Act to strengthen security and intelligence efforts. The act granted the President broad powers on the war against terror, including the power to bypass the FISA Court for surveillance orders in cases of national security. Additionally, mass surveillance activities were conducted alongside various other surveillance programs under the head of President's Surveillance Program. Contemporary mass surveillance relies upon annual presidential executive orders declaring a continued State of National Emergency, first signed by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 and then continued on an annual basis during the presidencies of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 authorized the PRISM surveillance program. Political commentators have criticized these acts, orders, and resulting database network of fusion centers as forming an American police state that institutionalized the illegal COINTELPRO tactics used to assassinate dissenters and leaders from the 1950s onwards. Under pressure from the public, the warrantless wiretapping program was allegedly ended in January 2007.
Additional surveillance agencies, such as the DHS and the position of Director of National Intelligence, have greatly escalated mass surveillance since 2001. A series of media reports in 2013 revealed more recent programs and techniques employed by the US intelligence community. Many details about the surveillance activities conducted in the United States were revealed in the disclosure by Edward Snowden in June 2013. Regarded as one of the biggest media leaks in the United States, it presented extensive details about the surveillance programs of the NSA, that involved interception of Internet data and telephonic calls from over a billion users, across various countries. Advances in computer and information technology allow the creation of huge national databases that facilitate mass surveillance in the United States by DHS managed fusion centers, the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) program, and the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
History
Post World War I After World War I, the US Army and State Department established the Black Chamber, also known as the Cipher Bureau, which began operations in 1919. The Black Chamber was headed by Herbert O. Yardley, who had been a leader in the Army's Military Intelligence program. Regarded as a precursor to the National Security Agency, it conducted peacetime decryption of material including diplomatic communications until 1929.
In the advent of World War II, the Office of Censorship was established. The wartime agency monitored "communications by mail, cable, radio, or other means of transmission passing between the United States and any foreign country"."Return to Sender: U.S. Censorship of Enemy Alien Mail in World War II", Louis Fiset, Prologue Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2001). Retrieved 5 October 2013. This included the 350,000 overseas cables and telegrams and 25,000 international telephone calls made each week. "Every letter that crossed international or U.S. territorial borders from December 1941 to August 1945 was subject to being opened and scoured for details."
Post World War II With the end of World War II, Project SHAMROCK was established in 1945. The organization was created to accumulate telegraphic data entering and exiting from the United States. Major communication companies such as Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Communications actively aided the project, allowing American intelligence officials to gain access to international message traffic. Under the project, and many subsequent programs, no precedent had been established for judicial authorization, and no warrants were issued for surveillance activities. The project was terminated in 1975.
Establishment of the FBI Institutional domestic surveillance was founded in 1896 with the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, which evolved by 1908 into the Bureau of Investigation, operated under the authority of the Department of Justice. In 1935, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had grown into an independent agency under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover whose staff, through the use of wire taps, cable taps, mail tampering, garbage filtering and infiltrators, prepared secret FBI Index Lists on more than 10 million people by 1939.
Establishment of the NSA In 1947, the National Security Act was signed by President Truman, establishing a National Security Council. In 1949, the Armed Forces Security Agency was established to coordinate signal operations between military branches. In 1952, the National Security Agency (NSA) was officially established by President Truman by way of a National Security Council Intelligence Directive 9, dated Oct. 24, while the NSA officially came into existence days later on Nov. 4. The existence of NSA was not known to people as the memorandum by President Truman was classified. According to The New York Times, the NSA was created in "absolute secrecy" by President Truman, whose surveillance-minded administration ordered, only six weeks after President Truman took office, wiretaps on the telephones of Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, a close advisor of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The recorded conversations are kept at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, along with other documents considered sensitive.
McCarthyism and COINTELPRO Purported to be chasing 'communists' and other alleged subversives, the FBI used public and private pressure to destroy the lives of those it targeted during McCarthyism, including those lives of the Hollywood 10 with the Hollywood blacklist. The FBI's surveillance and investigation roles expanded in the 1950s while using the collected information to facilitate political assassinations, including the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969. FBI is also directly connected to the bombings, assassinations, and deaths of other people including Malcolm X in 1963, Viola Liuzzo in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash in 1976, and Judi Bari in 1990.
As the extent of the FBI's domestic surveillance continued to grow, many celebrities were also secretly investigated by the bureau, including: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt – A vocal critic of Hoover who likened the FBI to an 'American Gestapo' for its Index lists. Roosevelt also spoke out against anti-Japanese prejudice during the second world war, and was later a delegate to the United Nations and instrumental in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 3,000-page FBI dossier on Eleanor Roosevelt reveals Hoover's close monitoring of her activities and writings, and contains retaliatory charges against her for suspected Communist activities. Frank Sinatra – His 1,300 page FBI dossier, dating from 1943, contains allegations about Sinatra's possible ties to the American Communist Party. The FBI spent several decades tracking Sinatra and his associates. Marilyn Monroe – Her FBI dossier begins in 1955 and continues up until the months before her death. It focuses mostly on her travels and associations, searching for signs of leftist views and possible ties to communism. Monroe's FBI dossier is "heavily censored", but a "reprocessed" version has been released by the FBI to the public. John Lennon – In 1971, shortly after Lennon arrived in the United States on a visa to meet up with anti-war activists, the FBI placed Lennon under surveillance, and the U.S. government tried to deport him from the country. At that time, opposition to the Vietnam War had reached a peak and Lennon often showed up at political rallies to sing his anti-war anthem "Give Peace a Chance". The U.S. government argued that Lennon's 300 page FBI dossier was particularly sensitive because its release may "lead to foreign diplomatic, economic and military retaliation against the United States", and therefore only approved a "heavily censored" version.
Albert Einstein, who supported the anti-war movement and opposed nuclear proliferation, was a member of numerous civil rights groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (See Albert Einstein's political views). As a result of his political views, Einstein was subjected to telephone tapping, and his mail was searched by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of a secret government campaign that aimed to link him with a Soviet espionage ring in order to first discredit him, and then deport him (unsuccessfully) from the United States. Martin Luther King Jr., a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights activist. An FBI memo recognized King to be the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.", and the agency wanted to discredit him by collecting evidence to (unsuccessfully) prove that he had been influenced by communism. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, experienced one of the most spectacular episodes of government surveillance and character assassination. The White House tried to steal his medical records and other possibly detrimental information by sending a special unit to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. These activities were later uncovered during the course of investigation as the Watergate scandal slowly unfolded, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.