Spying on millions of Americans in the 'United States of Secrets'

FRONTLINE documentary reveals U.S. domestic surveillance program's birth, evolution in secrecy

You have to remember that the NSA was created after World War II to prevent another surprise attack. That was the whole raison d'etre for NSA: Pearl Harbor. We don't want another Pearl Harbor. — James Bamford, author

When al-Qaida terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the staff at the world's most technologically sophisticated intelligence agency learned about it from a news broadcast on a $300 TV set. Shortly afterward, a transformation began at the NSA that would irrevocably alter the way the U.S. government regarded its citizens' privacy, just as Americans faced choices about what freedoms to sacrifice to prevent more attacks on home soil.

"You have an agency that was created to prevent something like 9/11 — they are not allowed to turn their eyes and ears on America. But of course, the attack came from al-QaIda operatives who had been living inside America," said Michael Kirk, producer, director and writer of a new FRONTLINE documentary film, "United States of Secrets," premiering tonight on PBS at 9 p.m. (check local listings) and previewed exclusively on Yahoo News.

The remedy, as we now know, was to turn an agency with a strict legal mandate to look outward at the activities of foreign governments inward, toward its own. "So the government was faced with a question: What do they have to do to walk right up to the edge of what's legal and right to protect the rest of the country?," Kirk, whose other film credits include the Peabody award-winning "League of Denial" and "Bush's War," told Yahoo News in a telephone interview.

Following those attacks it became apparent that if you were an American you'd better find an enormous amount of patriotic fervor and stifle any doubts about the removal of your civil liberties with the passage of the USA Patriots Act.  Like in the former East Germany Americans were encouraged to inform on their neighbors and friends like the former East German government did as means of keeping track of dissenters.