America’s intelligence community spends nearly $80 billion a year, including $57 billion for the National Intelligence Program and $20 billion for the Military Intelligence Program. Signals intelligence (SIGINT), mainly electronic eavesdropping, takes up the lion’s share of the budget. Among other things the National Security Agency recorded more than half a billion calls and text messages of Americans in 2017. In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Security Agency admitted — for the second time — that it improperly eavesdropped on Americans. The spooks’ ability to tap the conversations of prospective terrorists, foreign leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel and pretty well anyone it wants is a source of enormous power as well as justification for continued funding. All of that is about to come to an end and the spooks will have to find something else to do. That has a great deal to do with the incipient tech war between China and the United States.
Spengler, 'US-China tech war and the US intelligence community', Asia Times