158 By the first decade of the 21° century, the NSA’s surreptitious efforts to render the Internet transparent to US intelligence had earned it a new set of enemies. They were the previously- mentioned hacktavists who were attempting to shield the activities of Internet users from the intrusions of government surveillance. They employed both encryption and TOR software to defeat that surveillance. The NSA was not about to be defeated by the tactics of amateur privacy advocates. It did not conceal that it was intent on countering any attempt to interfere with its surveillance of the Internet. It built back doors into their encryption and worked to unravel the TOR scrambling of their IP addresses. It made leading hacktavists targets. Brian Hale, the spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, disclosed that the US routinely intercepted the cyber signatures of parties suspected of hacking into US government networks. Following the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the surveillance of the Internet also became an integral part of Bush’ administration’s war on terrorism. In October 2001, Congress expanded the NSA’s mandate by passing the USA Patriot Act. Section 215 of the act directly authorized the NSA, with the approval of the FISA court, to collect and store domestic telephone billing records. The idea was to better coordinate domestic and foreign intelligence about Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. The mantra in government after the 9/11 was to “connect dots.” Congress with this back essentially called for demolishing the wall by domestic and foreign intelligence when it came to foreign-directed terrorism. The act effectively made the NSA a partner with the FBI in tracking phone calls made from the phones origination outside the United States by known foreign jihadists. If these calls were made to individuals inside the NSA was now authorized to retrieve the billing records of the person called and those people who he or she called. Th