On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church stated on NBC's
Meet the Press without mentioning the name of the NSA about this agency:
“
In the need to develop a capacity to know
what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us
to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad
at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the
American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone
conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, 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, and there would be no way to
fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately
it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to
make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate
within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is
no return.