Watergate Wouldn't Have Happened if the NSA Had Tools They Do Now...

From a local blog, ARLnow:

"Monday Properties plans to tear down buildings at 1401 Wilson Blvd and 1400 Key Blvd in the Rosslyn, VA neighborhood, to make way for new mixed use development.”

"The parking garage below the buildings will be a casualty of the eventual redevelopment. Forty years ago, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met a source dubbed 'Deep Throat' — later revealed to be FBI official Mark Felt — in the garage, which was chosen because it was considered an 'anonymous secure location.' The information Felt passed on to Woodward helped expose the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. A sign outside the garage marks the location. Monday Properties says it expects the marker to stay even after the garage is removed."

The garage's location and Deep Throat's identity were secrets for 30 years until 2005 when Woodward wrote The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat.

Imagine if the NSA had the tools then that they have today. The scandal never would have been uncovered. Nixon would have remained in office--and would be hailed as one of the greatest Presidents of all time--even though he practiced “every dirty trick in the book.” Woodward would have been prosecuted for espionage and the Washington Post would have lost press access to the White House conferences and executive-approved leaks/sources.

If our NSA/CIA/FBI could do then what they do now there wouldn't even be a Watergate story because surely the reporter would have been tagged by his cellphone, his license plate, or surveillance cameras.  The source would have been thrown in prison for leaking info to the press under some provision of the "Patriot Act" or various Espionage Acts.  The garage would have been stamped "TOP SECRET" and sealed off decades ago.

One of the most constitutionally important events in US history simply never would have happened.

Our current NSA/CIA/FBI systems are every authoritarian's dream--absolute power and control over every form of global digital communication. It is all at any President's disposal--every minute slice of it that he theoretically can, and therefore eventually will—use to muffle or distort the speech of any citizen or reporter he chooses.  

It is not a question of if, but when, if not already. Remember Project SHAMROCK that illegally obtained and read copies of many Americans' telegrams until exposed by congressional investigators in the mid-1970s or the FAMILY JEWELS REPORT revealing, with the full knowledge of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, that the CIA in 1963 illegally eavesdropped on two unnamed Washington reporters who had been publishing leaks of classified information? 

The scary part is that now it's all legal...