CYBERSPACE – While the debate about the legality of President George W. Bush’s authorization of the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy upon U.S. citizens heats up, new examples of precisely how the NSA has been accomplishing its goals are coming to light. Among them: the use of spyware on the internet.While some international leaders fret about the potential of Google Earth to clue terrorists in about the location of sensitive governmental buildings and military bases, internet denizens should be aware that one of the most classified weapons in the NSA arsenal is likely to be the what Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore calls “vacuum-cleaner style dragnets” of online communications.

According to Gilmore, chances are good that the current administration has built a database containing all incoming and outgoing international telephone calls while simultaneously capturing at least the headers of similar emails. If true, the revelation would uncover the first instance of a U.S. administration participating in such far-reaching privacy invasion.

Currently the details of the government’s wiretapping and other privacy breaking enterprises are uncertain, but the existence of an NSA spyware application is not entirely unknown. It is known that the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), which preceded the National Security Agency, led a project named SHAMROCK during the early 1960s. SHAMROCK’s mission was to record, log, and index every communication going in and out of the country. Due to the cooperation of major businesses including Western Union, RCA, and ITT, the project was enormously successful and, in the words of SIC chairman Church, “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”