New rules for spooks

摘要

Before committing mass murder, one of the 9/11 hijackers made a call from San Diego to an al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen. At the time, the National Security Agency (nsa) had no way to tell that the call had come from America. Haunted by such lapses, successive governments have doubled the budget for intelligence in real terms since 2001, to $75 billion in 2012. At its peak, around three years ago, America was spending nearly twice as much on intelligence as it had during the cold war. Rather than write new laws to govern the use of this bounty, Congress relied largely on old ones, drawn up when the internet was an obscure government project.