The Biden administration has an endless appetite for power.
And Biden isn’t letting the Constitution get in his way.
Now Joe Biden’s NSA is demanding more power to spy on American citizens.
Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of the NSA under the Biden administration, gave testimony recently to Congress.
In that testimony, he made comments about domestic surveillance capabilities. Nakasone said, “We truly need to look at the ability for us to see ourselves and right now it’s difficult for us to see ourselves.”
What Nakasone means by “see ourselves” is see the day-to-day lives of American citizens. He wants NSA agents monitoring the phone calls, emails, texts, and Internet activities of ordinary people.
Of course, as Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, this already happens frequently. The intelligence community teams up with Big Tech to collect troves of information about its citizens – information that is then shared with other agencies and disseminated throughout the federal government.
But now the NSA and the rest of the intelligence community are calling for nearly all restraints on this activity to be lifted.
This means there would be a permanent record of every electronic activity that every American citizen engages in, and the government could sift through it at any time with no checks or balances.
Supporters of this spying will frequently say, “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear.”
However, these programs are a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Additionally, as was seen during the Trump administration, the intelligence community can wield these powers against their political adversaries at will, in order to entrench their power and subvert democracy.
The CIA and other agencies constantly leaked damaging – and often false – information attempting to tie Donald Trump to Russia, and hurt his political standing. This led to the Mueller Investigation which was based on false pretenses.
If the intelligence community gets to pick and choose which political figures to target, it calls into question the very nature of American democracy.
Nakasone is not the only one calling for more power for spy agencies. In fact, there appears to be a coordinated push for it, in multiple news publications.
According to the Washington Post, “former NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell says….more power for the agency is the answer.”
Former Obama defense secretary Robert Gates proposed “new arrangements giving authority to NSA’s incomparable resources.”
As the Daily Beast sums it up, “NSA needs to be able to spy on Americans, too, if you all want to keep using the internet.”
Many politicians have pushed back against expanding spying powers.
Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie have consistently voted against FISA reauthorization without major reforms.
And even Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has had enough, saying “Like clockwork, advocates of expanded surveillance are trying to exploit an intelligence failure.” referring to the recent SolarWinds hack.
The Deep State will always want more authorities to satisfy their endless craving for power. But until spy agencies are reined in, America’s Constitution and its democracy will be in serious jeopardy.