The National Security Agency Headquarters at Fort Meade
NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. The dark towers in this view were opened in 1986, more than a decade after the Nixon years — but the agency they house is the one whose domestic programmes were exposed in 1975.
Operation SHAMROCK ran from 1945 to 1975 and copied international telegrams by arrangement with the commercial cable companies. MINARET added a watchlist of American citizens, drawn up at the request of other agencies and including civil rights leaders, journalists and members of Congress. Neither had a warrant, a statute or a court behind it. The Church Committee's disclosures produced the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which is the framework every later argument about surveillance has been conducted inside. See the expansion of NSA surveillance during the Nixon era.
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