Project SHAMROCK collected millions of telegrams from 1945-1975, while Project MINARET targeted anti-war activists and civil rights leaders without warrants.
“The NSA focuses exclusively on foreign intelligence and does not monitor domestic communications”
From “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
For nearly three decades, the National Security Agency collected millions of Americans' private communications without legal authority or meaningful oversight. When whistleblowers and journalists finally exposed these programs in the 1970s, the revelations shook public confidence in intelligence agencies and forced a reckoning about the limits of government power. Yet this wasn't a recent discovery made possible by modern technology—it was an open secret that had been systematically hidden from Congress and the American public.
Project SHAMROCK operated continuously from 1945 until 1975, giving the NSA access to millions of telegrams sent by American citizens and businesses. The program worked through an agreement with telegraph companies, who quietly provided copies of international communications without warrants or court orders. During its three-decade run, SHAMROCK collected an estimated 150,000 messages per month at its peak. The NSA didn't need to ask permission or demonstrate probable cause; the communications simply flowed into government databases while citizens remained entirely unaware their private messages were being read.
Running parallel to SHAMROCK was Project MINARET, launched in 1969 to specifically target domestic political figures the government deemed suspicious. Anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, and political opponents found themselves under systematic surveillance. Again, warrants were not obtained. Again, the public wasn't informed. Again, the legal authority for such monitoring was questionable at best and nonexistent at worst.
Get the 5 biggest receipts every week, straight to your inbox — plus an exclusive PDF: The Top 10 Conspiracy Theories Proven True in 2025-2026. No spam. No agenda. Just the papers they couldn't hide.
You just read "NSA illegally intercepted Americans' communications for deca…". We send ones like this every week.
No one's said anything yet. Be the first to drop your take.
For years, officials denied these programs existed. When pressed about government surveillance activities, intelligence leaders provided carefully worded responses that technically avoided outright lies while remaining fundamentally misleading. The programs operated in such darkness that most members of Congress had no idea what was happening in agencies supposedly under their oversight. It took determined investigation and whistleblowing to bring the truth into daylight.
The breakthrough came when Congress finally conducted serious investigations in the mid-1970s. A select committee chaired by Senator Frank Church examined the NSA's activities and documented abuses that had previously been dismissed as impossible or fabricated. The Church Committee's findings were damning: the surveillance had been illegal, extensive, and motivated by political considerations that had nothing to do with national security. Documents and testimony from NSA officials confirmed what critics had alleged—mass surveillance of Americans had been standard practice.
These revelations mattered profoundly. They demonstrated that agencies created to protect national security could operate beyond public accountability. They showed that denials from official sources couldn't be trusted when those sources had the power to classify information and control what the public could see. They proved that surveillance capabilities, once developed, would inevitably be used for purposes beyond their original justification.
Today, decades after SHAMROCK and MINARET ended, these programs serve as historical landmarks for understanding government overreach. They show that concerns about mass surveillance weren't paranoid fantasies but patterns the government had already normalized. When Edward Snowden exposed NSA programs collecting phone records and internet communications in 2013, he wasn't revealing something entirely new—he was describing the modern iteration of what SHAMROCK had accomplished through telegrams.
The question for public trust remains unchanged: if agencies conducted illegal surveillance for thirty years before anyone found out, what assurance exists that similar programs aren't operating today? History suggests we should be skeptical of government denials.
Beat the odds
This had a 4% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~200Network
Secret kept
50.7 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
