How Thomas Drake, senior executive at the NSA, came to face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.

“The plaintiffs have good reason to believe that their communications, in particular, will fall within the scope of the broad surveillance that they can assume the government will conduct,” reads the ruling from the Second Circuit appeals court in New York.

The ruling highlighting growing U.S. “signals-intelligence” – or SigInt – practices stops short of confirming any such spying. But it is a rare judicial nod to fears that laws governing “foreign” surveillance practices have been watered down to the point of permitting disturbing dragnets.

The plaintiffs – which include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and several journalists including Ms. Klein – now have the legal standing to challenge the post-9/11 surveillance laws. A lower court had found their concerns “too abstract” and tossed out the suit.

The American Civil Liberties Union is leading the suit.

The U.S. National Security Agency is the most powerful SigInt body in the world. Its interception technologies are growing increasingly sophisticated even as U.S. spymasters have exploited legal loopholes to permit more spying.

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The Second Circuit ruling explains that while U.S. citizenry as a whole has little to fear, the plaintiffs are hardly paranoid if they take precautions to safeguard sources. “Fears of surveillance are by no means based on ‘mere conjecture,’ delusional fantasy or unfounded speculation,” the ruling says.

The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don’t realize when they’re nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade’s, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals.

Once this happens, it means that ground zero – the National Security Agency – is close by. But it’s not easy to tell where. Trees, walls and a sloping landscape obscure the NSA’s presence from most vantage points, and concrete barriers, fortified guard posts and warning signs stop those without authorization from entering the grounds of the largest intelligence agency in the United States.

Beyond all those obstacles loom huge buildings with row after row of opaque, blast-resistant windows, and behind those are an estimated 30,000 people, many of them reading, listening to and analyzing an endless flood of intercepted conversations 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

From the road, it’s impossible to tell how large the NSA has become, even though its buildings occupy 6.3 million square feet – about the size of the Pentagon – and are surrounded by 112 acres of parking spaces. As massive as that might seem, documents indicate that the NSA is only going to get bigger: 10,000 more workers over the next 15 years; $2 billion to pay for just the first phase of expansion; an overall increase in size that will bring its building space throughout the Fort Meade cluster to nearly 14 million square feet.

The NSA headquarters sits on the Fort Meade Army base, which hosts 80 government tenants in all, including several large intelligence organizations.

Together, they inject $10 billion from paychecks and contracts into the region’s economy every year – a figure that helps explain the rest of the Fort Meade cluster, which fans out about 10 miles in every direction.”

“Network World summarizes an RSA Conference panel discussion in which former NSA technical director Brian Snow said that cryptographers for the NSA have been losing ground to their counterparts in universities and commercial security vendors for 20 years, but still maintain the upper hand in the sophistication of their crypto schemes and in their ability to decrypt. ‘I do believe NSA is still ahead, but not by much — a handful of years,’ says Snow. ‘I think we’ve got the edge still.’ Snow added that that in the 1980s there was a huge gap between what the NSA could do and what commercial encryption technology was capable of. ‘Now we are very close together and moving very slowly forward in a mature field.’ The NSA has one key advantage (besides their deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes): ‘We cheat. We get to read what [academics] publish. We do not publish what we research,’ he said. Snow’s claim of NSA superiority seemed to rankle some members on the panel. Adi Shamir, the “S” in the RSA encryption algorithm. said that when the titles of papers in NSA technical journals were declassified up to 1983, none of them included public key encryption; ‘That demonstrates that NSA was behind,’ said Shamir. Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don’t necessarily use the same terms for them.”

The NSA-Google partnership is a natural one. Google is the world’s largest search engine and the largest information aggregate. Conversely, the NSA is the world’s largest electronic data analysis organization. Together they boast an enormous capacity to monitor and influence the Internet. In the face of cyber threats, Google stands to benefit a great deal from the NSA’s capacity to process information. The NSA can help Google analyze enormous amounts of data to diagnose security breaches and head off future assaults.

The partnership is equally important for the United States. Cyberspace joins with sea and space in what has now been collectively termed the “global commons.” But cyberspace presents new challenges for ensuring the same sort of freedom of action the United States has come to enjoy on the high seas. In a world where information technology drives business and facilitates trade, a stable, functional and reliable cyberspace is a critical national security issue.

For countries around the world, this possible partnership will be seen as both a blessing and a concern. The United States has the most technological and financial resources to dedicate to the stability of Internet communication. And the Internet is as critical to most countries — particularly developed countries — as it is for the United States.

The converse, of course, is that countries such as China will worry about the security implications of such a powerful partnership between Google and the U.S. intelligence community. And while many have decried the possibility that the NSA would gain unprecedented access to information on domestic users, the NSA is specifically designed to target international data — making this agreement much more important for foreign governments than for domestic actors.”

The further back something is in the past, the easier it is to analyze it in an accurate and dispassionate way. The old joke about it being too early to say what the effects of the French Revolution are seems appropriate here. The passage of time not only provides more information with which to judge consequences. It also creates emotional distance compatible with objectie thinking.

At least, that is the number Aid cites. The Wikipedia page uses the far lower figure of 5.4 tonnes of TNT.

Aid’s figure might be an error.