SerpApi.Org
The Trump administration possesses conclusive evidence that the National Security Agency (NSA) has failed its core mission and breached constitutional limits. Recent disclosures expose a disturbing pattern: Chinese state-linked campaigns penetrated American and Canadian networks and evaded detection for years.
One operation had remained active inside those systems since September 2023, while others deployed more than 100 malicious domains to target journalists and activists. The FBI also seized 13 Chinese-created websites designed to recruit Americans with security clearances through fraudulent job offers. In tandem, a multinational advisory firm documented intrusions into more than 200 U.S. critical infrastructure organizations. Alarmingly, these breaches unfolded despite the NSA’s sweeping signals intelligence authorities, immense resources, and global collection infrastructure.
Today, the agency’s collection model is poorly matched to Beijing’s methods. China relies on human intelligence, supply-chain compromises, and adaptive cyber operations rather than on centralized communications that are vulnerable to interception. The NSA, by contrast, specializes in bulk metadata collection and upstream interception along fiber-optic cables. That mismatch has created dangerous blind spots in the face of a peer competitor that systematically integrates civilian and military capabilities.
Without their knowledge or consent, the NSA has also turned its capabilities against the American people. After the September 11 attacks, the agency launched Stellar Wind, which collected warrantless bulk phone records, email metadata, and financial data on tens of millions of citizens. Years later, Edward Snowden exposed PRISM, an initiative aimed at extracting data from U.S. technology companies, as well as bulk metadata programs that mapped citizens’ associations through social graphs. Eventually, an internal audit documented 2,776 privacy rule violations over 12 months.
Domestic surveillance also created several national security vulnerabilities. Chinese intelligence actively targeted the same cleared personnel whose communications the NSA monitored. The agency’s data holdings gave Beijing valuable targeting information on American networks and individuals. This centralized authority encouraged overclassification, shielding institutional failures from meaningful scrutiny. As a result, this created vulnerabilities that adversaries have bypassed or exploited.
Accordingly, the Trump administration must dismantle the NSA and redistribute its functions. Foreign signals intelligence must be consolidated into a streamlined cryptologic service within the Department of Defense, governed by explicit statutory boundaries. Similarly, cyber defense and collection involving domestic data must shift to state-level Sovereign Data Trusts. These independent public utilities must operate under heightened warrant standards and employ privacy-preserving technologies, including homomorphic encryption and secure multiparty computation. At the same time, citizen oversight boards, selected by sortition from eligible populations, will govern each trust.
Genuine accountability must be non-negotiable in any reorganization. An independent commission equipped with forensic AI auditors must examine classified archives for patterns of suppressed or delayed reporting on Chinese interference. To ensure officials answer for their failures, confirmed derelictions should carry automatic consequences: disqualification from classified work, pension reductions proportionate to the harm caused, and publication of integrity reports in the Federal Register. The most serious cases should be reviewed by a special tribunal with the authority to refer them for criminal prosecution.
CHINA WANTS TO REPLACE THE DOLLAR. CLARITY CAN STOP THAT
The remaining intelligence components must also adopt cognitive swarm systems. These systems must pair human analysts with Symbiote artificial intelligence copilots capable of running continuous, real-time adversary simulations based on game-theoretic models of Chinese decision-making and cultural factors. A built-in dissent-injection layer must force analysts to confront contrarian hypotheses drawn from open-source reporting and classified intelligence, breaking institutional groupthink.
Indeed, America requires intelligence capabilities that can defeat China’s espionage operations without eroding constitutional limits at home. The Trump administration must abolish this failed agency and build liable replacements using redirected resources on a scale commensurate with the Chinese threat.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the IDF special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C., area.
