‘No Place to Hide’ from NSA, Then or Now

„Years before Snowden described the NSA’s powerful surveillance architecture as »a turnkey totalitarian state,« Church warned in a 1975 appearance on »Meet the Press«:

»The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government … is within the reach of the government to know.«

There would, he said, be »no place to hide.«

Given the state of the technology at the time, Church’s warning might have appeared alarmist or at least premature. Most of the illegal spying the Church Committee documented was conducted the old fashioned way, through hidden microphones, letters steamed open by the CIA and reels of telegraphic tape copied by NSA agents.”