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SYLACAUGA, Alabama – Harold Franklin never set out to attend Auburn University . The school with its agricultural heritage had little appeal for the bookish Franklin. “I used to hate when daddy grew a garden and I had to go out and help with it,” Franklin said. "That was the last place I wanted to go.” He had dreamed of being an attorney, inspired by his childhood idol Thurgood Marshall , the prominent counsel for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and first black Supreme Court justice . “I wanted to be a lawyer,” Franklin said, sitting on the couch in his two-bedroom apartment in Sylacauga below a framed photo of Samford Hall. “That was the most important thing to me.” Franklin graduated from Alabama State University , then named Alabama State College , in 1962 with a degree in government and psychology. Franklin was seeking character references for a law school application when an encounter with civil rights attorney Fred Gray put him on the track to b...

Photo by Andrea Yori | CC BY 2.0 In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance , agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations , and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year. Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus . According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “b...