And So, Always eyes watching you, the voice enveloping you.

A sleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed, no escape.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.

After Edward Snowden's leaks of National Security Agency materials in 2013, sales of George Orwell's famous novel

1984, about a tyrannical world government run by a secret all-powerful organization watching everyone at all times

jumped 6,000% overnight. This should give you a sense of popular opinion of the NSA in the world today.

Hello and welcome to Malicious Life. I'm Ran Levy.

The National Security Agency, NSA, is one of the most secretive

intelligence agencies of the United States.

For decades, the NSA has been wrapped in shadows, but in recent years more and more floodlights

have been directed at it.

Initially, it was Edward Snowden's leaked documents that revealed some of the organization's methods.

And later, it was the Wanna Cry Ransomware, which spread through an exploit called Eternal Blue, allegedly leaked from the NSA's Cyber Weapons Repository.

As with many American institutes, the story of the NSA can be traced back to World War II.

With advances in communications technologies,

a race for intelligence began between the warring ally and axis powers

where the ability to intercept your enemy's chatter became even more useful to war efforts

than strong soldiers and big guns.

The US learned its lesson and after the war took to centralizing and

improving its cryptographic intelligence forces. Seven years after the war, three years after the publication of 1984, the US National Security Agency was created at the bottom of the fourth page of a top secret memorandum from President Harry Truman.

The agency formed in secret would operate in secret for years thereafter.

Government officials even playfully gave the NSA its first nickname, no such agency, as it was even kept largely out of sight within Washington.

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