AMERICA'S MOST SECRET AGENCY

THE WEEK ( 2007) 8/31

(9) The CIA is common to most American, but the NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

is not well known. It's main job is to tap enemy spies and or terrorists. However, as it has grown and technology has improved, the agency can tap anyone's lines of communication in the USA and in a number of other countries. Project ECHELON can gather data in a number of ways and "data mine"  looking for various folks and their connections to the world. They can get information from the internet, television, cell phones...any electric device.

The NSA was created in 1952 and at first their work was very primitive. Today, there are roughly

40,000 employees spying on all kinds of people. At first, not all the Senators and Representatives

in Congress knew about it. Today, you can know. As an estimate, the agency gets about 9

billion a year. It is located in what is called Crypto City, a 60 building complex in Ft. Meade,

Maryland.

At one time, they spied on more controversial people who did not agree with the American government or a particular President. Now anyone can be spied on, tapped, and recorded.

In fact, if you want to visit NSA, there are portions of the area where you can visit. The policy  of secretiveness has changed because of a bad reputation and that it was hard to recruit employees.

This openness began slowly in the 1990's. One wonders if there is now another agency that deals with even more secret information. At this time, none have surfaced. You may want to try

WIKI  to learn more about it. . However, it appears that NSA has made a contribution to WIKI also.

THE NEW REPUBLIC (2007) 8/27 26-32

There is literally billions of dollar of infrastructure that need to be repaired in the United States.

What happened ? First as cities grew into large metropolitan geographical areas, overlapping city and county governments argued over who should make the repairs. In the meantime, bridges, highways and related went un repaired. Additionally, as soon President Reagan was elected monies for domestic infrastructure was continually reduced. The money formerly

used for repair went toward weaponry and tax cuts. Thus, we now are in difficult or dire straits.