The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to Donald Trump.
It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes NSA surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America’s most important civil rights.
The crown jewel of that system is the NSA, and there’s reason to think it will grow even more secretive and voracious in the Trump administration. Trump’s current transition team includes two of the NSA’s foremost defenders — Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and former congressman Mike Rogers — a move that suggests the agency will be moving toward more invasive collection and less transparency than ever before.
“No warrant or court approval is required”
To a large degree, those changes can be carried out completely in secret, without authorization from Congress or even the FISA court. The majority of the NSA’s operations are authorized under a little-known presidential mandate called Executive Order 12333, which authorizes collection of data inside and outside US borders for national security purposes. Because it’s an executive order rather than a law, it can’t be challenged in court or overturned by Congress, and it places almost no limits on what the NSA can collect.