Le Voguer, Gildas <br/><br/>
The “industrial complex” of the US intelligence community and the preservation of liberties 

 -  2015.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The recent revelations in the press about the National Security Agency’s internet surveillance programs and interception of private telephone communications have a strange sense of déjà vu. However, the scope of these programs is so large that one must acknowledge that the US intelligence community has entered a new era, one of mass surveillance. This article explores how, due to the shortcomings of human intelligence, the US intelligence community progressively gave priority to technical intelligence. In the wake of 9/11, this evolution had come to fruition and the intelligence community morphed into an “intelligence industrial complex,” which made mass surveillance systematic. But this development could not go smoothly in a country such as the United States, where a deeply ingrained sense of privacy and a long tradition of civil disobedience encourage whistleblowers to react.