The-Asterisk

As many of you may know, I, T. Hyphen Asterisk, was in the Navy for over 30 years both active and reserve. The entirety of my career was spent "behind the green door" in secure spaces. In my case, the green door was entire buildings, but for many of my fellow sailors, it could have been a cramped, closet sized compartment on a ship or a sub. Nevertheless, the intelligence which we gathered gave the US and our allies the edge in putting the Cold War to bed (despite the best efforts of traitors such as Aldrich Ames, Ronald Pelton and the Navy's scourge, John Walker .) After joining the Navy Reserve, my assignment was to a unit which worked in and around the NSA in this iconic building. One of the missions which our organization was assigned to prosecute was Own Force Monitoring or OFM. If you have ever been on a military base, you certainly saw the stickers on every telephone reminding you that your conversations may be subject to monitoring. Well, guess who did the mon...

What a week for a government entity who's initials not that long ago stood for "No Such Agency". The National Security Agency (NSA) is a part of the Department of Defense, not a part of the Justice Department like the FBI, nor is it an independent agency like the CIA. As such, its purpose is military intelligence gathering, not law enforcement and not explicit spying. Recently it has gotten into hot water because of leaks from former Booz Allen contractor, Edward Snowden. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported Snowden claiming that US intelligence had been hacking Chinese computers since 2009. Well, I certainly hope they did! C'mon, folks... spies spy, right? Haven't we been all up in a tizzy about the Chinese hacking everything we Americans do? Well, we should be hacking their stuff, too. The difference is what we do with the intelligence we gather. There is evidence that the Chinese use information gathered by spying on us to further their commerci...