Automating Security: The National Security Agency through the lens of Neo-Gramscianism.

Gramsci, The NSA, and Hegemony in the 21st century.

It is uncontroversial to make the claim that the function of the American National Security Agency (NSA) is absurd in a variety of ways. A relatively straightforward example of this is the observation that the NSA’s PRISM program—the program used to track individuals meta-data both domestically and internationally—has never resulted in the prevention of a domestic terrorist attack on American soil (Cayford et al 2018, 1005). Another example can be found in the fact that the NSA as an institution has an established pattern of rule-breaking, conducting illegal spying programs right from its creation in 1951 until revealed in 1975, leading in part to the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA), a piece of regulation meant to prevent the operation of surveillance without a warrant by bodies such as the NSA or CIA (Theoharris 2016, 529-530). One could even point to the fact that the NSA has recommended dismantling its PRISM program, on account of the fact that the program simply does not work when there is actual regard for legal boundaries set for in FISA and the Patriot Act (Strobel & Volz 2019).  

This paper is an attempt to provide a comprehensive history of the modern institution of the NSA from 2001 until Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013. After 9/11, the NSA created new surveillance programs that were both incredibly broad in scope, and largely inefficient. During this time, the institution was reinvigorated with legal justification through pieces of legislation of the Patriot Act, specifically section 215, that allowed the NSA to “Bulk Collect” metadata or in other words, surveil Americans and internationals seemingly at will (Snowden 2019, 223). This piece of legislation was paired in tandem with a Bush era executive order—the President's Surveillance Program or PSP—which allowed the NSA to collect telephone and internet records abroad without the use of a warrant from a FISA court (Snowden 2019, 172). These programs, while being an incredible violation of the rights of individual Americans and internationals, have been terribly ineffective at stopping terrorist attacks. They are costly, logistically unwieldy, and easy to abuse (Snowden 2019, 280).

 As well, this paper will take on a distinctly Neo-Gramscian perspective, using Gramsci’s definitions for words such as “hegemony,” and “passive revolution.” The strength in these terms and in Gramsci’s methods is the analytic opportunity they provide in an analysis of the NSA. By viewing the state as only just the blunt apparatuses of the executive, legislative, and the judicial branches of government, but also including the social classes that make up these ranks and the political spaces these same individuals permeate, the implications of a state apparatus co-opting the coercive might of private entities and their technologically-capable intellectuals can be better understood. 

Neo-Gramscianism.

Neo-Gramscianism is not a modernization of Antonio Gramsci’s beliefs regarding international relations, but rather an evolution of Gramsci’s political writing put into the context of international relations (Cox 1983, 162). Neo-Gramscianism (and critical theory in general) within international relations takes a distinctly critical perspective towards the state and statecraft- looking not just at the intentions and practices of a state or policy but its origins and the social conditions that lead to certain actions (Cox 1981, 129). Of course, most if not all theories within international relations are concerned with political origins and social conditions within the international sphere, but what makes Neo-Gramscianism particular is the attention paid to these phenomena, believing these traits to play a key role in state behaviour (134). In the Neo-Gramscian view, politics and international behaviour is dynamic, often reflecting ongoing social and political change within the state itself (134). The political behaviour of a state is predicated on a bedrock of economic relations which lay the foundation for the possibility of specific beliefs and ideologies within the civic identities of the state. In other words, the economic and historical conditions of the state lay the groundwork for the political ideologies possible within a given state (135). This phenomenon within Neo-Gramscian thought is referred to as Historical Materialism (135). From Historical Materialism comes the term Historicism: the idea that the concepts that define the political landscape are meaningless without consideration for the historical conditions within which they are situated (Cox 1983, 162-163). 

In practice, the theory of Historical Materialism is carried out by “Historical Structures”: individuals, groups, or institutions that carry with them certain ideological beliefs and material capabilities (Cox 1981, 135-136). Historical Structures often look to materialize their power through the process of institutionalization—taking on a physical structure that in turn becomes part of the broader administrative and legal power of the state (137-138). The institution of a historical structure can be said to be hegemonic once it plays a key role in the power relations of the state (137). Not all historical structures are able to achieve institutionalization, and not all institutions can be said to be hegemonic, but within a given state exists several key hegemonic institutions which operate the power of the state.

For Gramsci, hegemony is a necessary end in itself of a historical structure. In addition, hegemony also has a distinct function: it is a means through which a historical structure maintains and develops political power (Cox 1983, 163-164). Hegemony of an institution plays a key role in crafting the political behaviour of both its inhabitants and those who are required to interact with the administrative and coercive power of the institution. Gramsci’s conception of hegemony in part comes from Machiavelli’s metaphor of power as a centaur: part man, part beast (164). The beast is reference to the coercive might of an institution, the apparatuses of violence it possesses to defend itself and subject others to its will. The man is a reference to the “consented upon” apparatuses of the institution, the parts of the institution that give the impression that the institution has an important legal, social, or utilitarian reason to exist.   

Finally, Gramsci describes what he calls a war of position, as opposed to a war of movement. A war of position is the slow co-opting of positions of power within a society by a contesting historical structure asserting itself against the existing hegemonic historical structure, attempting to build up the resources to achieve power within a state through either the creation of new institutions or the co-opting of already existing institutions (165). This is in contrast to a war of movement, which is a literal revolution or ongoing revolutionary conflict. The long term goal of a war of movement is a “Passive Revolution”: the accomplishment of fundamental changes to the state and its leadership without the mobilization of social forces (166). The accomplishment of a passive revolution is possible for both progressive and reactionary reasons. Any historical structure can attempt a passive revolution, altering both the power and structure of the state and the ideology of its inhabitants to gain control. 

Put simply, Gramsci believed that the state was a dynamic and temporal apparatus where rulership was always contested by contesting ideas, histories, and identities. This conflict was defined by the political opposition between institutions and social forces. Different groups within society are able to accomplish victory (for a period) over others, and subject the population to their forces and values. Hegemony is achieved when, according to Robert W. Cox, the ruling class is able to “ensure conformity of behaviour in most people most of the time” (164). 

Pre-9/11 History of the NSA.

The institution of the NSA was formed in 1952 as the successor to the Army Signals Security Agency (ASSA): A World War II era agency primarily concerned with the collection of Nazi and Soviet communictions through international telegraph lines (Theoharis 2016, 529). This program, referred to as operation SHAMROCK, was continued after the Second World War despite the fact that the war-time measures that allowed for this sort of invasive practice had expired(529). The program in the post WWII period was used to spy on communist sympathizers domestically and internationally. Despite tension between the private companies who maintained these lines and the American state due to the lack of legal justification to continue spying through telegraph lines, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was able to reassure the private entities by promising that then president Harry Truman would introduce legislation retroactively legalizing the practice. While this sort of legislation would never manifest, congress did approve a bill in 1951 which criminalized “non authorized” persons from leaking information regarding code-breaking (529). This efficiently meant that when the NSA took over the ASSA in 1952, their continuation of operation SHAMROCK was entirely illegal, but so was discovering and speaking on operation SHAMROCK—a catch-22. Operation SHAMROCK would be carried for over 20 more years, intercepting on average over 150,000 telegrams monthly in the last several years of the program (530). When operation SHAMROCK was exposed, congressional investigators had attempted to access the NSA’s records. This proved impossible, as the NSA has destroyed millions of its records for house-keeping purposes (530). Not only was operation SHAMROCK entirely illegal, the destruction of the records it collected rendered it entirely pointless. It was as if it simply existed to commit an illegal act. As well, congressional investigation exposed another illegal NSA spying operation, implemented near the end of the 1960’s referred to as operation MINEART, which spied on the actions of well-known left-wing activists and artists such as Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Martin Luther King jr, Eldridge Cleaver, and David Dellinger (530). Of course, the NSA isn’t particular in this sort of operation at the time. One only needs to look towards COINTELPRO or operation Mockingbird to find similar practices from the FBI and CIA from the time. 

Barring a minor role in the Vietnam war, unsuccessfully attempting to implement new forms of communication through operation NESTOR, the NSA’s existence through the first half of the Cold War is virtually defined by its illegal spying operations. Throughout the second half of the Cold War, the NSA played a much smaller role in spying operations. As a series of congressional hearings throughout the mid 1970’s and the subsequent FISA act had damaged the NSA’s ability to commit covert operations without a warrant, the NSA spent the rest of the Cold War battling internal strife and congressional attempts to access the institution’s documents (Finley & Esposito 2014, 186). The NSA’s website, for instance, notes two key events from the 1980’s: the conviction of two former NSA operatives for espionage, and president Ronald Reagan attending the opening of a new NSA building (NSA/NCSS 60th Anniversary Timeline- 1980’s, n.d.). The 90’s section of the timeline lists a minor role in maintaining communication infrastructure during Desert Storm, the opening of a new museum dedicated in the history of cryptology, and administrative change (NSA/NCSS 60th Anniversary Timeline- 1990’s, n.d.).

A relatively simple explanation for the minor role in intelligence that the NSA played during the second half of the Cold War is that the institution was largely created in the first place to carry out illegal spying operations. When the spying operations of the NSA were exposed and stronger controls were put in place, the covert nature of the institution essentially evaporated, decimating whatever use the institution was actually supposed to have. There was no role the NSA could play in the second half of the Cold War that wasn’t already being filled by either the CIA or FBI. This left the NSA, something of an already obscure institution in the context of the Cold War, to be left without any major direction until the aftermath of 9/11. 

9/11 and its consequences.

In the shadow of 9/11, one of the most significantly discredited federal institutions within the United States was the CIA. Despite having a monopoly on American intelligence since nearly the end of the Second World War, the CIA’s inability to predict or prevent 9/11 essentially shattered executive faith in the institution (Snowden 2019, 124). According to Edward Snowden, in the immediate years that followed 9/11, the culture within the CIA became that of “victimization” and “retrenchment” (124). This institutional culture only deepened in 2004, when CIA director George Tenet was forced out of his position. This position was then filled by Porter Goss, who immediately downsized the agency under congressional pressure (124). Finally the CIA was then reorganized into five different directories; one assumes this was done so that the institution's capability would be less centralized. 

The fracturing of the CIA left a power-vacuum in the realm of the American intelligence community. While Congress, the general public, and the Bush administration had come to significantly distrust the CIA around this time, the American executive was, counter-intuitively, attempting to escalate its ability to operate covert operations (172). The NSA appears to have been the perfect institution to fill the new role (Greenwald 2014, 1). 

There are two important pieces of legal justification that immediately follow 9/11 that allow the NSA to become a behemoth of mass surveillance: Section 215 of the Patriot Act (28), and an executive order directly from the Bush administration with authorized the NSA to carry out warrantless wiretapping (Snowden 2019, 172). Section 205 of the Patriot act lowered the standard required for a government agency to acquire “business records” from a private company regarding its clients, needing only to demonstrate a mere “relevance” to an investigation (Greenwald 2013, 28). The NSA interpreted this as authorization to collect all American metadate coming through American telephone providers such as AT&T and Verizon (Snowden 2019, 223). This practice was operationalized through the FISA courts. If the NSA wanted to collect documents from a private company, all it had to do was make a request through the FISA court, which the FISA court would approve over 99% of the time (231). Between 2002 and 2012, out of over 20,000 requests from the FISA court for business records (a rate of roughly 5 or 6 per day for ten years), the FISA court rejected 11 requests, or 0.06% percent of all requests (Greenwald 2013, 128).  

While the intended purpose of section 215 of the Patriot Act may have been to lower the bar needed for information requisitions to private entities, this section was actually wholly unnecessary legally in the immediate years following 9/11. The Bush administration had created an executive order known as the President’s Surveillance Programs (or PSP) which granted the NSA the right to collect telephone and internet communications as it saw fit (172). Section 215 was actually used to legitimize the use of large-scale spying programs and surveillance infrastructure through the FISA courts (231). Instead of ruling on the surveillance of individuals on a case-by-case basis, section 215 was used by the NSA and the FISA courts to give a legal justification to incredibly broad, incredibly invasive spying apparatuses. While the PSP would expire in 2007, as the liberties permitted under the PSP would simply be re-permitted in the Protect America Act of 2007, and the FISA Amendment Act of 2008 (172). 

A mild congressional fail-safe, the congressional intelligence committees, are supposed to protect against this sort of legislation. Created in the 1970’s as a congressional method to stop rampant, unaccountable intelligence agencies after a series of scandals, by the early 2000s, these committees had morphed into defenders of the actions of the NSA (Greenwald 2013, 130). Headed by Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Republican Mike Rogers throughout the 2000s, the congressional intelligence committee essentially acted as an entity primarily concerned with justifying the NSA and blocking other congressional attempts to access information about the agency (130). 

The NSA then, immediately after 9/11 and up until the Snowden leaks, had an incredible amount of legal and political authority. Whether through Congress or the presidency, the NSA essentially had nothing but the full support of the American state behind it. This is not particularly surprising; the paranoia of the American state in the direct aftermath of 9/11 is well-noted. What perhaps is surprising is that the fail-safes in place to stop this sort of abuse, namely FISA, the congressional intelligence committee, perhaps even the Constitution, were not enough to prevent the development of the largest spying apparatus history has ever seen. This is heightened by the fact that the authority for a sitting president to give an intelligence institution the right to spy on American citizens has “no legal basis” (Snowden 2019, 174). This assumption of authority went unchallenged during this time despite its unprecedented nature. This legal tension was fixed by proper legislation in 2007 and 2008 (Protect America Act and FISA Amendments Act) which gave proper congressional authority to the NSA to continue its program of warrantless spying, retroactively legalizing the practice (172). 

Just as important as the socio-political context that gave authority to the NSA are the changes to its internal structure during this time. Snowden refers to a particular type of government worker from this period that made up the ranks of America’s intelligence community- the Homo Contractus (111). Snowden describes Homo Contractus as a dispassionate and “transient” worker that would flip between the public and private sector depending on the best possible wages (111-112). Within the American intelligence community,  individuals who fit the Homo Contractus stereotype almost always begin their work within government before splintering off into private practice, often using the government work as a means to achieve clearance to access classified information (113-114). This should not be viewed as a practice the government “tolerates”; the American federal government was largely in favour of it. As both the public and private aspects of the American intelligence community have the same client in the American federal government, the private sector ends up being a means by which the federal government can increase the size and capability of the intelligence community without having to subscribe to federal caps on hiring (112). It is also relatively cheaper, as private sector contractors are able to cut costs the public sector cannot, while also not having to pay for benefits or pensions. It is also almost certainly a means by which the American intelligence community can remain less accountable, as was the case in 2013 when the US government tried to paint Edward Snowden as just a private contractor with virtually no connection to the NSA (117). 

As the NSA expanded operations, so too did its need for technically capable people who were able to understand the cyber-landscape. During this period, the sort of person who fit this position was relatively young— in their early to mid 20’s—and relatively unqualified compared to the public servants of past generations (115-116). This was essentially the industry standard, as the only sort of person with that sort of in-depth understanding of the internet was relatively young (116). Hiring technical workers with no post-graduate education was a normal practice despite being completely against the rules (2). Snowden, a highschool dropout who became a technical expert for the NSA despite holding relatively few credentials is an example of this (Greenwald 2013, 41).  

The bottom level of the NSA, that being systems administration and engineering, was essentially entirely contracted out to corporations in the private sector like Dell or BAE Systems  (Snowden 2019, 115). These private entities would then subcontract out the work to smaller private entities, who would be willing to do the busy-work of hiring workers and working out the logistics of a contract (117-118). The level above this base-level was managerial, where Homo Contractus would switch back and forth between the public and private sector (117). The managerial level had virtually no understanding of the technical side of the work at the administrative level. Snowden describes the oversight he received when first starting his career as nothing more than a middle-aged man who read spy novels (2). 

While relatively little is known about the upper-levels of NSA’s structure, there is at least some information on the actions of NSA directors between 2001 and 2013. Michael Hayden, NSA director from 1999 until 2005, was under extreme pressure from the White House to revamp the NSA into a modern spying apparatus (Mayer 2011). While Hayden had started his position as NSA director primarily concerned with reorganizing the agency’s crippling bureaucracy, Hayden’s priorities completely changed in 2001 (Mayer 2011). Barack Obama, then just a senator, would criticize the ruthlessness and rapidness by which Hayden would attempt to implement the PSP (Greenwald 2016, 181). Some have even argued that the PSP was originally an idea developed by then CIA director George Tenet and Hayden, which was then authorized by the Bush administration (Weiner 2008, 557-558).   

When Hayden was reassigned to director of the CIA in 2005, he was replaced by four-star general Keith B. Alexander. Though Hayden's own tenure was marked by incredible development of the might of the NSA, Alexander turned the NSA into “the largest and most costly” spying operation in history (Finley & Esposito 2014, 186). While Hayden’s own tenure as director of the NSA was marked by incredible expansion of the NSA and its practices, Alexander’s tenure was defined by the radical pursuit of the means for mass surveillance, summeried in his personal motto “collect it all.” (Greenwald 2013, 95). Alexander saw his primary mission at the NSA was collecting as much data as technologically possible, and storing it for as long as possible (95). Characterized by his “cowboy” approach and “worry about the law later” methods, Alexander’s methodology was first put into practice regarding Iraqi signals intelligence (or SIGINT) (95). While the Patriot Act had allowed for indiscriminate spying on non-American citizens, Alexander believed the practice of spying on individuals to be far too narrow and effective (95-96). What Alexander conceived of was a practice by which the entirety of the Iraqi population could be subject to metadata spying (96). Whether or not spying on the entirety of the Iraqi population was the predecessor, or the successor to American domestic spying is somewhat unclear. What is clear is that the NSA developed infrastructure and methods largely under the guise of spying on Iraq that by 2005 would be implemented on American citizens (96). 

Begun under Michael Hayden and brought to fruition under Keith Alexander, the NSA developed a 6 step program which served as both a method, and philosophy, for the institution.  Step 1, “Sniff it All,” referred to locating sources for data extraction (Snowden 2019, 223). Step 2, “Know It All,” referred to attempting to find out the actual content of the data (223). Step 3, “Collect It All” (a phrase adopted from Alexander) referred to the process of collecting as much data as possible (223). Step 4, “Process It All” meant coding the data for intelligence uses, as well as developing methods which could be better used to categorize the data (223). Step 5, “Exploit It All,” referred to the actual use of that data for domestic and international security purposes (223). Step 6 “Partner it all,” referred to the sharing of data and data-collection methods with allied states and their respective institutions (223). 

These institutional constraints (or lack thereof), ideologies, capabilities, and actors are the foundation for literally the largest spying programs ever implemented in history. Operations such as PRISM and XKEYSCORE were predicted on the radical and virtually boundless ambition of institutional leaders who had no discernable concern for the rights and liberties of the average person. These ambitions were filtered through an institution where the bulk of those employed were essentially unqualified in way one or another to implement proper controls and limitations. The policies created from this environment and their respective operation is a testament to the problematic aspects of the NSA.

The aforementioned PRISM is probably the most well-known of the NSA’s programs. Created in 2007, PRISM was an operation that routinely collected data from private tech companies like Google and Facebook (223). PRISM, in practice, was essentially an ongoing prodding of private tech companies for documents referring to their users through the FISA courts (231). The access PRISM gave the NSA regarding the information of private entities was massive, so much so that NSA agents were essentially able to search the records of tech companies without any correspondence from the company itself (Greenwald 2013, 109). Access through PRISM meant access to stored records and access to live, real-time surveillance (110). Private response to this practice was varied. While some tech entities such as Verizon (27) and Yahoo! (109) had fought (and lost) to keep the NSA out of their systems, others such as Microsoft had played an enthusiastic role in allowing the NSA access to their services, even perhaps developing parts of the NSA’s PRISM systems (112-113). This is not particularly surprising given the huge role the private sector has played in administering the NSA’s programs.

BOUNDLESS INFORMANT is a similar program. While less is known about its actual operations since its reveal by Edward Snowden, it is of similar size and capability to PRISM, if not larger. BOUNDLESS INFORMANT is primarily concerned with telephone calls and emails, collecting records of around 100 billion phone calls and 125 billion phone calls monthly at the time of BOUNDLESS INFORMANT’s revolution (92). A single unit within BOUNDLESS INFORMANT is able to collect as much data on its targets as the entity of China’s surveillance systems (92). Similar programs include; PROJECT BULLRUN, a joint operation between the NSA and the British state’s spying apparatus. EGOTISTICAL GIRAFFE, an operation that specifically targets users operating a Tor browser (an encryption service meant to provide users a degree of anomaly between their browsing habits and personal identity by connecting users through dozens of international servers before arriving at the desired browsing destination, essentially “lengthening” the space between online behaviour and the users). MUSCULAR is a program that specifically targeted the services of Google and Yahoo!. OLYMPIA is a joint operation between the NSA and the Canadian state to spy on the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy during the tenure of Lula Da Silva and Dilma Rousef (94). STORMBREW is a joint program operated between the NSA and CIA which targets international information that travels through electronic communications on American soil. The philosophy behind this program is the fact that the internet is maintained in large part by American infrastructure (107). Finally, there are a handful of NSA programs focused less on bulk collection and more on individual corporations to gain access to larger portions of the internet. The most prolific of which, operation BLARNEY, is a partnership between the NSA and AT&T meant to (in the NSA’s words) “Leverage unique key corporate partnerships” through the interception of sensitive corporate data (103). It's difficult to interpret this as anything short of blackmail. Unique programs are put together for international leaders as well, such as former Brazillian prime minister Dilma Rousseff and German chancellor Angela Merkel (139, 141). 

Even more powerful is the NSA’s use of “Upstream Collection.” While collection through private entities yields a massive amount of data, the NSA has been able to co-opt an incredible amount of the public infrastructure that holds up the internet through the various routers, switches, statlities, fiber-optics that make up the very structure of the internet (Snowden 2019, 224). So powerful is this technology that at any given point, should virtually any random person visit a website on any location on the internet, there is a relatively high chance that a copy of that information will be made and stored within the NSA’s information reserves (225). If one’s actions for some reason trip up the NSA’s algorithm for suspicious internet behaviour, the algorithm can infect one's personal computer with malware, so that nothing stored on the computer (credit cards, photos, programs—literally anything at all) can be hidden from the NSA (225-226). This happens constantly, at a rate of literally billions of records per day. Even the NSA considers this “far more content than is routinely useful to analysts” (Greenwald 2013, 98). One estimate put the entirety of the NSA’s records on Americans' online habits at around 20 trillion between 2006 and 2012, a rate of over 9 billion records per day for six years (99). Since this number only counts domestic records, this number is easily several times higher if international records are included. Part of what makes this possible is the fact that over 90% of the infrastructure used to maintain the internet was either “developed, owned, and/or operated by the American government and American business, most of which are physically located on American territory” (Snowden 2019, 163). 

The logistics of this are mind-boggling. While the NSA has the ability to fit an entire terabyte of data into a thumb drive “the size of a man’s pinky” (a startling revelation in itself), the NSA requires the use of several massive storage locations around the world. According to reporter James Bamford, these buildings usually incorporate about 25,000 square feet for pure storage (about half the size of the average Canadian Walmart) with an additional 900,000 square feet for administration and technical operation (around the size of the average shopping mall) (Greenwald 2013, 153). The NSA also incorporates a kilometer long storage facility in Hawaii, and half of a storage house in Tokyo (Snowden 2019, 165, 214). This is not including the private storage the NSA has access to through private “Cloud” store facilities, to which nearly every large American tech company gives access (193). All together, around the time of Snowden’s revelations, the NSA had the ability to access and store 75% of the internet’s activity, going back several years (Greenwald 2013, 99). 

Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 would unleash a chaotic response from both the American federal executive, the NSA, and the media. Snowden was painted as an opportunist, a homo contractus, who had abused his position at the NSA for a chance at fame, infamy, and the opportunity to discredit American credibility (Snowden 2019, 117). Both Snowden and Greenwald include full chapters in their books (both chapters in each book titled Fourth Estate) documenting the wild responses from the media, casting Snowden as untrustworthy. For the sake of space, these responses will not be examined in-depth. Instead, this section will close on the words of Michael Harris, appointed new director of the NSA in 2014. Harris claimed that the “sky was not falling” in regards to Snowden's leaks, as the incredible and vast spying apparatus the American had developed post 2001 had been of “minimal” benefit to American counter-terrorism (Theoharis 2016, 520). The NSA, and its vast spying structure, could not have been said to contribute to preventing even a single domestic terrorist attack (Greenwald 2013, 250). One has to wonder if anything comparable in history has ever been so massive, and so useless.

Critical Perspective: Gramsci and the NSA. 

The history of the NSA, to a large extent, rebukes analysis from either a realist or liberal perspective. The NSA cannot by any stretch be seen as promoting liberal values or ideals, violating the rights of peoples all over the world essentially indiscriminately. The NSA and its practices are distinctly illiberal prima-facie. The realist perspective is rebuked by both the domestic forces of the time and the illogical actions taken by the Bush Administration and the American intelligence community at the time. If realism is the belief that the state makes rational, self-interested decisions to preserve its power with relatively little influence from domestic society, realism is a relatively weak theory to describe the growth of the NSA and the decisions of the state in this period. Put simply: domestic politics played a huge role in the course of action which the Bush administration took to respond to 9/11, and the decision to create the largest spying apparatus in history cannot necessarily be seen as “rational,” especially when this incredible structure of power has not produced any sort of tangible, domestic results. Realism could provide a normative assessment of the topic, noting that the Bush administration should not have allowed domestic politics to play a role in its response to a terror attack, but that is not necessarily the goal of this essay. 

This is one of the ways a Neo-Gramscian analysis may be an improvement over other theories within IR. For instance, the notion of Historicism has little issue describing the power with which President George W. Bush was able to manifest the legal authority to create the PSP. By any stretch, one imagines that there should’ve been measures in place to stop the President of the United States from simply wiping away the privacy of citizens, such as the FISA courts, the Constitution, or Congress. Instead, neither the FISA courts nor Congress attempted to stop the President’s actions because within that moment in history, these institutions believed the best course of action was to allow the executive power to act in an almost certainly illegal manner. Confronted with a domestic sphere that was perceived to be radical and unsafe to the state, the apparatus of the state decided to modernize and intensify its coercive power through the intelligence community. In line with the metaphor of the minotaur, the use of violence and the suspension of rights is essentially the expected result of a state that has perceived itself to be losing a degree of hegemony, nor should this reaction to external forces be expected to be a rational decision based on the notion of self-interest. Instead, this reaction must be understood through the context of historical-materialism, a context that asks: what are the state's economic and historical conditions that could predicate its decision-making process? For a United States that had just just finished decades-long conflict with an ideological enemy, it may suddenly seem rational for the executive power to perceive a certain ideology as the enemy, as the state had already done for so long just before. The age of the internet may have been perceived as a new means to access the ideology of its inhabitants. In decades past, the CIA or FBI would’ve stalked the target, gone through their mail, or tapped their phone lines to gain access into the target’s ideology or perceived terroristic project. In the age of the internet, these sorts of covert operations are relatively unnecessary, as the behavior of the target is exhibited within their online behaviour. From this, it can be demonstrated that the leviathan of modern surveillance that is the NSA is perhaps the logical result of generations of war with an ideology, especially in the context of the Bush administration where the members of the Cabinet, and the leaders of the American intelligence community, had begun their political careers and gained their political understandings through the context of the Cold War. From this, a Historical Structure can be observed in both the actions of political actors and institutions. While 9/11 most certainly serves as a critical juncture within the history of the American state, and has unique consequences for American society, it seems completely unlikely that the dawning of the largest and most invasive spying apparatus in history, created in less than half a decade, could be possible without aspects of American society and the state being prepared for its arrival. From this, it is observable that the modern NSA is the fruition of a Passive Revolution of administrative state power. The event in which George W. Bush was able to simply conjure the authority to give the NSA the power to indiscriminately spy can be described in Gramscian terms as a moment of Caesarism: a term used to describe the moment in which a state leader is able to use the social forces present within the state to create a new tool of power at the state’s disposal (Robert Cox 1983, 166).  

A second key aspect of Gramscian analysis is the idea of Trasformismo: the co-opting, bending, or outright thievery of individuals, practices, or groups from other social or political movements by the hegemonic power (166). The NSA conducted Trasformismo in at least two significant ways. One, through the hiring of under-qualified but technologically savvy individuals to operate the programs of the NSA, and two, through the subjection of private corporations to the whim of the hegemonic political power. Hiring young, computer savvy individuals gave the NSA efficient technical knowhow to operationalize the whims of the American executive power in the post 9/11 world, while also subduing the possibility that many of these individuals would ever use their technical abilities against the state or American interests. The process of subjecting private entities to the will of the state had roughly the same purpose but to a much larger extent. One imagines that if any singular domestic entity could’ve exposed the actions of the NSA to the American public and the world at large, a large company like Microsoft or Google would have fit the bill, and would also have had the capital to fight off legal challenges from the NSA. Instead, the state went out of its way to bend private corporations to its will through blunt legal structures like the FISA court. Other companies simply accepted the new world they found themselves. All of these processes lead to a new epoch of cybernetic hegemony. With long appendages formed from state power, private corporation, and capable technologists, the structure of the NSA is similar to that of a kraken, with its tentacles wrapped around the entire world. 

Another consequence of hegemony is the dual nature of the legal justification given to the NSA by both the PSP and Patriot Act. Taken together, it seems unlikely that both legal sources, in practice, were necessary when they were used in relatively similar ways. If George W. Bush could simply instruct the American intelligence community to spy without a warrant on Americans and internationals, it is unclear why section 215 of the Patriot act was even necessary in the first place, when Bush had already created the PSP in early October of 2001 (Weiner 2008, 557-558). But one can make sense of this dual legislation if one understands that both a coerced, and consented-to aspect of policy creation are necessary to preserving the hegemony of the state. Whether intentional or not, the PSP and section 215 functioned in a sort-of legal symbiosis that gave mild congressional consent to the use of spying. Again, this mirrors the concept of hegemony as a minotaur, where part of its power comes from the perspective of being consented-to, and part of its power comes from outright coercive might. Section 215 would continue to function in this way until challenged in 2015 in ACLU v. Clapper, and amended to prohibit the bulk collection of Americans data (327). The FISA courts are still able to demand records from American telecom providers, but the random bulk collection of the last generation has been reigned in, at least to some extent.

On the other hand, one should be extremely suspicious of whether or not a single legal decision is enough to stop the ability of the NSA. The NSA itself is not just an incredible domestic force that happens to have a large international aspect to its operations, but is also the figurehead of an international community of state spying operation known as the “Five Eyes,” a group which includes Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand (Greenwald 2013, 91). NSA methods and beliefs regarding the collection of data have found its way into other state-spying programs, with phrases like “collect it all” defining the motives of covert operations with the UK and Japan (97-98). The NSA even pays for access to other spying agencies, such as the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), where the NSA has given over £100 million to the operation (118). As well, the NSA has played a key role in financing and building the spying operations of several other countries including Canada, Israel, Japan, Macedonia, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey (124). ACLU v. Clapper may have somewhat tightened the restrictions around the NSA’s actions, but there is little reason to believe that the NSA won’t simply use its access to other spying operations to gather information about Americans. In fact, it may not even have to go that far if the FISA court is still the only true domestic reign on the NSA. There is little reason to believe the FISA court will suddenly cease its obedience to the NSA. 

This inability for a handful of domestic laws to stop the rampage of hegemony is Gramscian in the extreme. For Gramsci, international hegemony and world order meant establishing a structure in which nations submissive to the hegemonic order find comfort in their positions of submission (Robert Cox 1983, 171). This international order creates the opportunity for a war of position within other states internal to the hegemonic order, creating the material conditions for a passive revolution: the development of a new international administrative power that reinforces the hegemonic order and ideologically justifies it. Thus hegemonic world order “is not merely an order among states'' but a reality holding profound metaphysical and epistemological consequences for states and its inhabitants (172). For Gramsci, hegemony crafts the rules by which states operate, reinforces hegemonic order, establishes the values to which hegemony adheres, coopts the authority of other states’ institutions, and disarms movements that challenge hegemony (172). A single domestic court decision is insufficient to stop this newly established hegemonic order. It could even be seen as a necessary part of upholding hegemonic order: a necessary concession meant to give the impression that the power of the NSA is nowhere close to before. This impression is not the case. 

On a more micro-level, the history of the NSA as an institution is one where a pattern of rule-breaking and problematic operations is established within its very foundation. The NSA thrives at its best as a covert and unaccountable organization fundamentally concerned with carrying out operations with little or no oversight or public record. This is as true in the recent years of the NSA as it was during the second half of the Cold War, as already mentioned, the NSA is simply unable to accomplish real goals when public oversight is a reality (Strobel & Volz 2019). Interestingly as well, the internal structure of the NSA seems to lack any set of rules for expected behaviour from its workers. Snowden never notes any sort of policy related to the expectations of technical workers within the structure of the NSA, and in fact goes out of way to note the fact that NSA workers would never be publicly prosecuted by the government out of fear that the NSA’s cover would be blown (Snowden 2019, 280).  This lack (perhaps even fear) of oversight led to practices Snowden describes as “a travesty of intelligence” (280). The XKEYSCORE program, the most powerful tool the NSA has at its disposal, was often referred to as LOVEINT from within the institution. The XKEYSCORE program would often be used by agents to search up people the workers were attracted to search through their emails and other communication services for nude pictures and revealing information (280). NSA agents would save naked pictures stumbled across even within their actual work and show the rest of the office what had been intercepted (280-281). The practice was apparently so common that Snowden refers to the naked pictures of both random strangers and individuals searched up by NSA workers as “a sort of informal office currency” (280). While this sort of practice is harder to place within a Gramscian analysis, it most certainly is indicative of an institution with little useful oversight. 

Conclusion: What is to be Done?

According to Gramsci, the means by which structural change is possible is only accomplished through a war of position where members of a historical structure are able to acquire certain positions within society to counter the already existing hegemonic order (173). If this is the case, perhaps the only real means to stop the development of an institution like the NSA is for groups counter to the NSA’s hegemony to achieve positions within structures actually capable of dismantling the NSA’s capability, such as Congress or the American presidency. One imagines that Gramsci would see the hope that the NSA will simply correct itself given enough legal pressure from the very state power that made its massive expansion possible as completely unfounded and immaterial in the extreme. Instead, the solution would have to be located in the will of groups of people who intentionally and actively reject the idea that the NSA has anything of value to offer society. Power does not just evaporate: it must be actively deconstructed. 

The likelihood of this development, of a historical structure gaining power within hegemonic institutions and using these institutions to dissolve the NSA seems relatively slim as it currently stands. The NSA seems to have slipped out of the public consciousness just as quickly as it entered in 2013. One can speculate why this is the case, and be rightfully suspicious about this odd public amnesia regarding the largest spying operation in history. Regardless, the political and public will to bring the actions of the NSA to a halt does not seem to exist. This is disheartening for anyone with a genuine concern for government accountability.

On the other hand, this does not somehow mean that the will to properly dissolve the NSA can never exist. As the international society enters a new epoch regarding the rightful place of the state in the age of climate change, international organizations, and transnational corporations, it certainly seems possible that the sort of power organizations like the NSA hold will have no place within an international community fundamentally concerned with the prospect of humane human survival. Perhaps this is the sort of hopeful optimism Gramsci would find unfounded. Regardless, in the context of a new age, power will have to be redefined, and with it, its operators. 

References

Cayford, M., Pieters, W., & Hijzen, C. (2018). “Plots, murders, and money: Oversight bodies evaluating the effectiveness of surveillance technology.” Intelligence and National Security 33(7): 999-1021 doi: 10.1080/02684527.2018.1487159

Cox, Robert W. "Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations : An Essay in Method." Millennium 12 (2)(1983): 162-175.

Cox, Robert W. "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory." Millennium 10 (2)(1981): 126-155.

Finley, Laura and Luigi Esposito. "’Digital Blackwater’: The National Security Administration, Telecommunications Companies and State-Corporate Crime," State Crime 3(2) (2014): 182-199.

Greenwald, Glen. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014).

Greenwald, Glen, “Afterword: War without End.” in The Assassination Complex, ed. Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 179-189. 

Mayer, Jane. “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an Enemy of the State?” The Newyorker. May 23, 2011. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer#ixzz1MXdUFeE9

Snowden, Edward. Permanent Record (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019). 

Theoharis, A. “Expanding U.S. surveillance powers: The costs of secrecy,” Journal of Policy History, 28(3)(2016): 515-534 doi: 10.1017/S0898030616000208

Voltz, Dustin and Warren P. Strobel. “NSA Recommends Dropping Phone Surveillance Program.” Wall Street Journal. April 24th, 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/nsa-recommends-dropping-phone-surveillance-program-11556138247