[1][2] In the aftermath of the 1970s Watergate affair and a subsequent congressional inquiry led by Senator Frank Church,[3] it was revealed that the NSA, in collaboration with Britain's GCHQ, had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam War leaders such as Jane Fonda and Benjamin Spock.
Under J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) carried out wide-ranging surveillance of communications and political expression, targeting many well-known speakers such as Albert Einstein,[14][15][16] Frank Sinatra,[17][18] First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,[19][20] Marilyn Monroe,[21] John Lennon,[22] and Daniel Ellsberg,[23][24] Through the illegal COINTELPRO project, Hoover placed emphasis on civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. (amongst others),[25][26] with one FBI memo calling King the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.
The effect was still overwhelming: a stunning, dismaying indictment of U.S. intelligence agencies and six Presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, for having blithely violated democratic ideals and individual rights while gathering information at home or conducting clandestine operations abroad...[29]During World War II the U.K. and U.S. governments entered into a series of agreements for sharing of signals intelligence of enemy communications traffic.
The agreement "tied the two countries into a worldwide network of listening posts run by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.'s biggest spying organisation, and its U.S. equivalent, the National Security Agency.
Based on the UKUSA Agreement, it was created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s.
[35] The European Parliament stated in its report that the term "ECHELON" was used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicated it was a signals intelligence collection system capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally.
But the BBC has confirmation from the Australian Government that such a network really does exist..." In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the scope of domestic spying in the United States increased significantly.
On January 1, 2006, days after The New York Times wrote that "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,[42] the President emphasized that "This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America.
[51] On March 15, 2012, the American magazine Wired published an article with the headline "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)",[52] which was later mentioned by U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson during a congressional hearing.
[53] In early 2013, Edward Snowden handed over 200,000 top secret documents to various media outlets, triggering one of the biggest news leaks in the modern history of the United States.