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It can be pretty hard to hear with the word “terrorism” crammed into your ears.

At least that appears to be true for many Americans these days, as evidenced by recent poll results regarding Edward Snowden and his revelations about secret government spy programs.

The polls show that most of us think that Snowden — the 29-year-old former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked documents to the Guardian newspaper, exposing the agency’s surveillance programs that monitor our phone records and email — is guilty of espionage or even treason, and should be sentenced to prison accordingly.

These same polls also reveal that the majority of U.S. citizens believe that it’s acceptable for the government to collect such data on hundreds of millions of us without warrants or probable cause as long as it uses the information only to fight terrorism.

But what if that wasn’t the whole story? What if fighting terrorism were only an afterthought in the government’s motives behind the creation of the secret spy programs exposed by Snowden? What would we do if it were discovered that this massive government intrusion into our private lives had been going on long before the first plane hit the first Trade Center tower? These are the questions we should be asking.

Edward Snowden was employed by Booze Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor that bills itself as a strategy and technology consulting firm. The company has very close ties to, and often works on projects for, the NSA. At the time of his [Snowden's] decision to expose the NSA surveillance programs and other highly classified information, Snowden was serving as a contract systems administrator at the agency.

What Snowden has revealed so far is that at least one telecom company, Verizon, is allowing the NSA to collect its metadata to create a bank of information containing every telephone call on Verizon’s system. The NSA claims that it collects all the calls but can only use the information once it has probable cause and a court-approved warrant to do so. Based on past media reporting from 2006 that exposed similar relationships between the NSA and other phone companies, it is currently being assumed in most news reports that all or nearly all of the major telecommunication companies have similar relationships with the NSA.

... Snowden also revealed the existence of an NSA program known as Prism, which allows the NSA to monitor the email of most Americans. The NSA claims that it is not violating the privacy of any U.S. citizen and that it is conducting these surveillance operations legally under the authority of the USA Patriot Act.

[Joe Nacchio and Qwest]

...The redacted area of the unsealed documents was filled in by The New York Times on Dec. 16, 2007, when it reported that

“executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency [NSA] access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order.”

The NSA’s Groundbreaker project was no ordinary government program. It was, in fact, at the time, the largest federal outsourcing of work in history, with an overall budget estimated at between $4 billion and $5 billion. The purpose of Groundbreaker was to completely reinvent and update the NSA’s IT systems to more effectively interact with the changing digital systems that were in use at the major telecommunications companies, among other things. More than 40 companies would eventually get massive contracts from the Groundbreaker project, including Verizon. Qwest never got one dollar.

... despite its acknowledgement of the argument’s merits, the court mysteriously reversed itself and never allowed Nacchio’s attorneys to fully present the NSA retaliation argument because of the classified nature of the information.

But what the unsealed documents did do was to show that the NSA was actively engaged in gathering massive amounts of domestic phone data prior to 9/11 and the creation of the Patriot Act.

The documents also confirm that interviews conducted with James Payne collaborated Nacchio’s claims regarding what happened at the Feb. 27, 2001 meeting with the NSA, including the agency’s request to gather Qwest’s customer call data. Payne also stated that the NSA continued to request access to Qwest’s customer call data for several years, and that the agency basically suggested that if it didn’t get the access it wanted, Qwest could be jeopardizing its future contracts with all departments of the government, not just the NSA.

The documents also refer to interviews conducted with NSA counsel. A summary memorandum of those interviews was given to the Nacchio defense team. According to the unsealed documents, the summary memorandum confirmed that one reason that Nacchio and Payne were brought to the Feb. 27 meeting at NSA headquarters was to try to gain access to the company’s phone call data. The memorandum also says that “Qwest was denied any agency work as a result of Mr. Nacchio’s refusal.” The document goes on to say that when Nacchio’s attorneys “brought this admission to the court’s attention, the statement was then disavowed.”

[More on Pre-9/11 Surveillance]

...Also, according to a federal lawsuit filed on June 23, 2006, in New Jersey, the NSA, AT&T and IBM were working together as early as February 2001 to construct a network operations center identical to the AT&T facility in Bedminster, N.J., so that the NSA could monitor all calls and Internet traffic on the company’s network.

“The NSA program was initially conceived at least one year prior to 2001 but had been called off; it was reinstated within 11 days of the entry into office of defendant George W. Bush,” the suit claimed.

Finally, there are the accounts of whistleblowers William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe, former NSA employees who have been highly critical of the agency and its mass surveillance program – both before and since 9/11 – and who have backed the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its efforts to combat NSA monitoring efforts.

According to the Government Accountability Project (GAP), the NSA could not keep up with the information and communication explosion associated with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, so a team that included Loomis, Binney and Wiebe developed a program to analyze, streamline and isolate the growing amount of data available. That system, called ThinThread, could filter out irrelevant data, removing the need to send and store large amounts of information for later analysis. The program even had an “anonymizing” feature to protect the privacy rights of U.S. citizens, according to the GAP. The system was ready to roll in January 2001, but Binney and Wiebe say the NSA opted for a more expensive and undeveloped program, Trailblazer, whose bloated budget would benefit private contractors more than the in-house system they had developed. (Trailblazer was retired in 2006 after costing more than $1 billion and is considered by some to be one of the worst failures in U.S. intelligence history.)

Binney estimates that the NSA has intercepted between 15 trillion and 20 trillion information transmissions since 9/11, relying on a system called Stellar Wind, a system based on a component of ThinThread — but without the builtin privacy protections, according to the GAP.

All of this documented mass surveillance activity by the NSA in 2001, prior to 9/11 and the signing of the Patriot Act, would seem to fly in the face of what we have been told — and are still being told — about such spying even today, as NSA officials testify before Congressional hearings regarding the recent NSA leaks at the hands of Edward Snowden. The NSA claims that all of its spying started as a result of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and has always been done legally — either approved by the executive branch by way of the Patriot Act or authorized by Congress — and all the while overseen and condoned by the courts.

But as the evidence points out, such a claim simply isn’t true. The NSA was clearly working hard to create systems that would collect massive amounts of phone and Internet data in 2001, prior to the attacks. For a plausible explanation for this behavior, we have to look at one of the most important underreported stories of our time. Literally underreported.

In 1996, New Zealand based journalist Nicky Hager shocked the world with his exposé on a global surveillance system known as ECHELON. Hager wrote a book [Secret Power] about his findings, which were controversial enough that elements within the British government wanted to ban the book from being sold in the U.K. In the U.S., a summary of Hager’s ECHELON revelations was published in the award-winning Covert Action Quarterly in its winter 1996/1997 edition [see Exposing the Global Surveillance System]. That same story went on to be named as one of Project Censored’s 25 most important underreported stories of the year in 1998.

[Nicky Hager and ECHELON]

Hager’s investigation took him years to complete and ultimately allowed him to interview more than 50 people who had worked in the intelligence community under a secret program known as the UKUSA agreement. According to Hager, the UKUSA agreement was created in 1948 and was a secret Cold Warera intelligence alliance between the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The organization spied on every country around the world that it considered a threat.

The main players in the organization were the NSA; the UK’s spy agency equivalent, the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ); New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB); and the intelligence services of Canada and Australia.

In the 1980s, the NSA introduced a new program to the UKUSA agreement that had amazing capabilities. The program was called ECHELON.

In Covert Action Quarterly, Hager described the ECHELON system as being ripe for abuse because it operated virtually without any restraints, a sobering assessment, considering Hager’s description of the system’s capabilities.

“The system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Computers at each secret station in the ECHELON network automatically search millions of messages for pre-programmed key words. For each message containing one of those key words, the computer automatically notes time and place of origin and interception, and gives the message a four-digit code for future reference. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for key words have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. Using the ECHELON system, an agency in one country may automatically pick up information gathered elsewhere in the system. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.”

Hager discovered that ECHELON was intercepting email, faxes, telex messages and telephone calls. In a later update to his article he noted that the NSA had achieved an “ominous capability for large-scale automated telephone monitoring.”

What made ECHELON so effective at gathering mass amounts of indiscriminate data was its ability to pull in virtually every form of communication that moved through the world’s global network of communications satellites and microwave towers.

ECHELON had the perfect system — until technology once again changed. By 2000, fewer and fewer of the world’s messages the NSA wanted to collect and store (much as it claims to be doing today in the programs leaked by Snowden) were moving through the air via satellites. By early 2000, it was estimated that only about 5 percent of Europe’s phone and email messages were being carried by satellite, and much of the developed world used the old technology even less than that. And the problem for the NSA’s ECHELON program would only get worse. By 2006, 98 percent of all international messages — phone, email or others — were traveling underground by fiber optics. This was true of nearly all of the phone and email messages in the U.S. as well.

The NSA needed a new system if it was going to continue to eavesdrop and collect data. The following concept, while admittedly speculative, may well explain what was happening in 2001 before the 9/11 attacks.

Technology dictated that as the year 2000 arrived, ECHELON needed a major makeover if it was going to continue to be capable of monitoring most of the world’s communications as it had been doing. In light of this fact, and the timing, it could be that the largest outsourcing project in U.S. history, the 2001 NSA Groundbreaker program, which was launched prior to 9/11, was the agency’s answer to continuing ECHELON surveillance into the new century.

This would explain the justification of the $5 billion Groundbreaker budget, as well as why the NSA wanted, and needed, to bring all of the major telecommunications companies on board — by way of offering them a carrot, in the form of lucrative contracts worth, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. Groundbreaker also required that the companies getting the contracts had to hire NSA staffers as their own employees. This makes sense, if ECHELON was going to be tapping directly into the global telecommunications apparatus, because that system was more geared to “underground” fiber optics than satellites. This fact even makes sense of the program’s “Groundbreaker” moniker.

Apparently, should this theory turn out to be accurate, the NSA’s plan for remaking ECHELON by virtually incorporating the telecommunication industry and its technologies into the spy network worked very well. It was reported by USA Today in 2006 that Qwest was the only major U.S. telecommunications company that had not given the NSA access to its phone data. It does make one wonder at what price to Qwest. Any other telecommunications company and its leadership watching the government’s handling of Nacchio and Qwest might certainly have thought twice about not cooperating.

In summary, the existence of ECHELON could explain why so much mass information-gathering by the NSA was occurring before the 9/11 attacks and the Patriot Act. And the technological advances that pulled global communications increasingly away from satellite and microwave tower transmissions, and into fiber optics, could likewise explain the need for the $5 billion Groundbreaker program.

It is clear that the NSA has been collecting massive amounts of indiscriminate information on people, including U.S. citizens, for many years, dating back to before the 9/11 attacks. Does the NSA use its mass collection of data to fight terrorism? No doubt it does. But the question should be, what else does it use its data for, and what was it using it for before terrorism became the perfect rationale or excuse for such activities?

According to Hager’s sources within the system, ECHELON data was used for many purposes, including corporate espionage on the part of the NSA. Hager’s reporting noted that many governments around the world have been frustrated with the U.S. because of what they view as unfair economic use of intelligence data. Hager has cited several specific examples in his writings.

So why should Americans trust the NSA to never abuse its power with regards to Snowden’s recently leaked mass surveillance programs on U.S. citizens? The answer is anything but clear, considering that the NSA has been collecting such information on many of us for far longer than it is now admitting, and that is has already abused its powers to spy on nongovernmental organizations and to commit corporate espionage, despite the fact that both of these practices are illegal.

Should we now trust the NSA not to illegally monitor environmental activists or Tea Party adherents or labor organizations? How can we trust an agency or a government that is still trying to claim that it didn’t get into the domestic phone call monitoring game until after 9/11, a claim that simply isn’t supported by the evidence?

The answer is we can’t. We need to get rid of that word “terrorism” that is clogging our ears, so we can hear the truth.