NSA wants even greater powers … to defend Wall Street

The villainous nexus of surveillance, politics and banking rears its head again in the NSA chief's public comments

Feel this blow as a coup de grâce: The NSA not only, we now know, hoards data on our every communication, but, we now learn, wants to have broader surveillance dragnets and deeper spycraft capabilities in place to defend that other great villain of the past decade — Wall Street. The nexus of power and control linking Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street was made almost cinematically complete in comments from NSA Chief Keith Alexander to lawmakers this week.