That's because its purpose is to protect state security not "national security". The NSA also provides surveillance in countries where the U.S. has an interest in "regime continuity". A 2013 top secret memo details the agency's plans to provide "direct analytic and technical support" to the Saudis on "internal security" matters. In 2013, the U.S. State Department reported that "Ministry of Interior officials sometimes subjected prisoners and detainees to torture and other physical abuse," and noted its use of invasive surveillance targeting political and religious dissidents. Even before this program, the CIA had long been working with the Saudi regime to bolster "internal security". According to the memo, the NSA began collaborating with the MOD in 2011 on a "sensitive access initiative… focused on internal security and terrorist activity on the Arabian Peninsula"; that partnership was conducted "under the auspices of CIA’s relationship with the MOI’s Mabahith (General Directorate for Investigations, equivalent to FBI)." The CIA has a long history of supplying intelligence for U.S. client terror and repression. In 1962, the Kennedy administration shifted the mission of the militaries in Latin America from "hemispheric defense" to "internal security". Charles Meachling Jr., who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961-1966, explains the consequences of the 1962 decision as a shift from toleration of "the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military", to "direct complicity" in their crimes, to U.S. support for "the methods of Heinrich Himmler's extermination squads."
