This Newsletter Was Paranoid About the NSA in 1996, and It Was Eerily Correct

​Ever since Edward Snowden leaked thousands of top secret documents to journalists laying bare its most guarded secrets, the NSA, a government agency that was once known as the No Such ​Agency for its love for secrecy, has been thrown in the media limelight.

But people have been freaking out, to a certain extent, over the NSA's powers for a long time.

In a newsle​tter dated May 26, 1996, titled "The [NSA] is Poised to Control the Internet," the unidentified author talks about how the computer revolution, then in its infancy, would help the NSA spy on everyone online.

"A computer revolution seems to be happening and with it a dramatic increase in people using the Internet, as well as people watching what the people use it for," read the newsletter, which has been making the​ rounds on the Internet on Thursday, after someone found an old mailing list​ post apparently authored by Julian Assange. (It appears that the WikiLeaks founder was simply distributing the newsletter, but he is probably not the original author of the essay.)

"Ever heard of the NSA? This could very well be the NSA decade for the Internet. Conspiracy, power struggles and surveillance of the citizenry may be what is remembered about the NSA during this period of time," the author wrote in a newsletter called NorthStar, which billed itself as a "a guiding light to help you focus on the issues which threaten our Internet Freedom."

The essay goes on to discuss the NSA's authorities, its budget, and its ability to spy on American communications as long as one end is outside of the country—sometimes even when both ends are inside US borders.

It even criticizes the NSA's reliance on semantics to justify its actions. "Target" the author noted, doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means for the NSA. This eerily echoes the NSA's justification for its bulk data collection programs: it's just "collection," not "targeting," US officials have repeatedly said.

The newsletter sometimes veers into bombastic proclamations, such as:

"A President with a Napoleonic or Stalinistic delusion would find the perfect tool for the constant supervision of the individual by the state in the NSA; not unlike scenarios depicted in novels such as Orwell's 1984."

Or: "There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny."

But in essence, this newsletter essay is a remarkable reminder that the current debate over NSA's (and more in general, the US government's) surveillance power is nothing more than a rerun of a debate we've had around twenty years ago. Back then, during the so called ​Crypto Wars, the US government was trying t​o shove the infamous surveillance backdoor known as the Clipper Chip down Americans' throats, arguing that it needed a way to spy on telephone communications for national security's sake.

Does that sound familiar at all? If it doesn't, read what the F​BI​ Director James Comey, as well as his NSA counterpart ​Mike Rogers and other high placed ​government officials have been saying about encryption in the last six months.

Edward Snowden, in an online Q&A just a few days after revealing that he was the whistleblower behind the NSA bombshell reports published by Glenn Greenwald and others famously​ said: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on."

In other words: encryption is the only answer to mass surveillance. Twenty years ago, the answer was the same. This is how the newsletter presciently ended:

"What can be done? - you say. There is a solution…..Encryption."

The more things change, the more they stay the same.