Is That Legal?

... shucks... by the time he got to the full rectal cavity search I was ready to pull out my pocket book and show him a monetary expression of how grateful I was to be treated with such patriotic suspicion."

Glad to know the NSA will take your work for that. Come to think of it, they should know the answer (and who you've been calling) before asking it.

Because the museum is tiny, and carefully placed just out of site of the (huge) main NSA building, it's easy to miss the museum and go through the main NSA gate past the gaurds and the tank traps and so forth. The same thing happened to a busload of people from the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference a week earlier, on their way to a guided tour of the NSA museam. The guards came through the bus and made us show some sort of ID, but they didn't copy down any info about us, and didn't ask for Social Security numbers. Only when we began to file -- led, totally coincidentally, by an ACLU spokesperson who happened to be first off the bus -- into the NSA "Visitor Center" (actually just a credential-issuing office, but in a separate small buiding so you can't even approach the main building without being vetted), did they begin to question what we were doing there. "What kind of budges do you have?", they asked, looking with puzzlement at our CFP conference name tags. "We aren't expecting any visitors today."

But the museum and the other nearby exhibits, including a spy-plane park and a memorial to NSA spooks (including, of course, the one chiselled in the black granite for posterity as "Name Withheld") shot down on overflights "tickling" Soviet border radars, are worth a visit if you are in the area with a car. And then there are the NSA coloring books and the Future Spooks of America section of their Web site....

Do you really think that being politely asked if you are a citizen is equivalent or in any way analogous to being beaten up with a nightstick?

[ELM: No, Niels. You're missing the point. The person with the nightstick is a Kapo.

Think about it.]

Another CFPO'er, Wendy Grossman, has a review in The Register from the same visit of what the museum does and doesn't say about the NSA and its history.