The National Security Agency (NSA) was created in 1952 and is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland. It is under the direction of the Department of Defense and reports to the Director of National Intelligence. Although classified, the NSA has approximately 37,000 employees (1) and an estimated operating budget of approximately $11 billion per year; for comparison, the Central Intelligence Agency has approximately 20,000 employees and an operating budget of approximately $14 billion per year. 'year (2 ). The current director of the NSA is Keith B. Alexander, who has served since 2005 and is the sixteenth director of the NSA since its inception. Although the NSA was created in 1952, the history and origins of the NSA can be traced under several aliases, all the way back to World War I, when the military gathered information from foreign radio messages, and then in World War II used cryptologists to crack German ciphers and the Japanese Navy's main encryption system. President Harry S. Truman eventually officially created the NSA in 1952. (3) After its official birth, the NSA's first major assignment was Operation Minaret, tasked with monitoring anti-Vietnam critics such as Martin Luther King , Muhammad Ali and among others, allegedly illegally intercepting their telephone conversations (4). Thereafter the NSA appears to have flown under the radar from Vietnam until September 11, 2001 and the aftermath of the War on Terror, likely due to the lack of information released on the operations. However, thanks to Edward Snowden's whistleblowing efforts, new light has been shed on the NSA's most recent activities. Officially, from the mission statement on the NSA website, "The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (N...... middle of paper...ret; think of the vast scale that could have been implemented if the current NSA capability had been available then. Now think if today's NSA capability was available during McCarthyism The amount of paranoia surrounding McCarthyism coupled with today's NSA capability would have implicated large numbers of innocent people, more than already. vast number of innocent people implicated by McCarthyism. These are also not extreme examples that have happened in the last 50 years, most parents have experienced both of these extreme but disturbingly plausible examples if the government were to use the NSA for the populace. It may seem like perpetuating conspiracy theories and reading fictional books like 1984, but these scenarios are plausible. Regardless of whether you believe the government is benevolent or not, it is a fact that the government is not infallible.