Securing America

July 26: The National Security Act became law on this day in 1947, President Truman signing off on the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, as well as a reorganization of the military. Cold War politics led to the formation of the National Security Agency in 1952; since 9/11, its mandate in signals intelligence has produced so many petabytes of data that it needs a warehouse, says James Bamford in The Shadow Factory, that is “almost the size of the Alamodome.”