Reviews for The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

The average rating for The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-10-23 00:00:00 Simon Miranda "There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss'the abyss from which there is no return." (p 344) Bamford's turf is the NSA and he mines that lode again. This time with an eye towards how the gathering of intelligence changed from a focused peering into the doings of potential enemies abroad to spying on the doings of everyone, American or not, in the USA or outside. It is a chilling account of how fear-mongering and a near complete disregard for the law have been used to take us to a dangerous brink. Every phone call, every e-mail, every time. Nothing is off-limits for today's info-gatherers. Bamford goes into the detail. He describes in fine detail the many bits of information that were available re the 9/11 hijackers who were training in the United States, and explains how it came to be that that critical information never made it to the people who might have used it. While our capacity to collect intelligence may have mushroomed, our ability to shoot ourselves in the foot with political and turf wars remains problematic. His tale is not one of criticism alone. He makes important points about the difficulties involved in managing intelligence, the challenge of coping with new, vast quantities, the political issues significant in limiting communication between the NSA and other departments, and notes many decisions that were made by the Bush Administration that relegated constitutional privacy protection meaningless. The government cannot invade our privacy alone. It must rely on the cooperation of private market info-carriers. So, it asks, coerces carriers to allow the NSA to tap into their lines, their routers, their connection to all and sundry data pipes. The carriers are occasionally reluctant, fearful of lawsuits, but the government usually insists. Bamford cites a 1994 federal statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that requires communications companies to engineer their facilities so that their network can be easily monitored. (p 210-11) Alarmingly several of the companies heavily involved in new spying technology for the USA have significant ties to foreign governments, most particularly to Israel. It is not a stretch to say that as a result of this, what we hear, they hear also. Government restrictions on foreign entities being involved in US spying do not extend to private companies, a major loophole. Another legal loophole applies to limitations on the US right to spy on American citizens in the US. The government has arranged with foreign intel services to do it for us. Bamford marks his trail through these shadowy woods with many, many crumbs. At times it seems that there is too much detail. But it is all in a worthy cause. It is important to see, line by line, what happened, what information was available, where it went and what happened with it, step by step by step. It is important for us all to know what our government is up to, what lines it is willing to cross, and maybe, just maybe, by casting some light on these dark recesses, Americans who care about preserving our freedoms can begin to address these dark impulses. For who can doubt that such tools will be used to stifle dissent at home as they are used for that purpose abroad? =============================EXTRA STUFF GR friend Jan Rice sent along an excellent article from the May 23, 2011 issue of The New Yorker magazine. Titled The Secret Sharer, it tells the terrible tale of an NSA whistle-blower who fell afoul of our military-industrial-intelligence complex. Making it clearer once again that there is no law, only power, and we are right to be concerned, very concerned about our loss of privacy. February 1, 2016 - Bamford's latest article in Foreign Affairs looks at foreign nations buying advanced spyware on the open market. Scary stuff - The Espionage Economy

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-30 00:00:00 Michael Huxley Dear NSA, hope you enjoy this review. Your government (whichever on it is) monitors you when you think it not, it always has and always will - to one degree or another. This used to be a cumbersome proposition involving the infiltration of groups and verbally reporting what was overheard to government handlers. However, modern communication technology makes eavesdropping relatively simple given enough of the right resources. In his extensive review of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Big Brother snooping in general, Bamford considers all angles of governmental spying (technology, politics, law, history, employment in the field, etc). However, the supercomputers, analysis software and techniques of tapping fiber optic cables, satellite transmissions, Skype interactions, etc that most interest him. His mastery of the intricacies of such spycraft impresses yet he avoids burying or excessively boring his readers with his depth of understanding. In fact, the reader leaves the book with enough know-how to carry out their own spying campaign - assuming he or she has a supercomputer and the ability to force AT&T executives to break the law. The reader also leaves with the understanding that nearly no aspect of modern life hides from the NSA from the obvious, phone calls and emails, to the less apparent such as monitoring movements via E-Z pass and Metrocards. Bamford also spends substantial time on the legal, or complete illegality as it more often turns out, of the National Security Agency's (NSA) monitoring of the U.S. and the world. He reports that certainly the events of September 11, 2001 turbo-charged the warping and out-and-out disregard of the U.S. Constitution. However, through the historical perspective he brings, he demonstrates that illegal wiretapping dates back to the U.S.'s founding noting that the NSA's predecessor organization infiltrated the telegram business briefly after its invention. The stories about the NSA's efforts to skirt or overcome unreasonable search and seizure prohibition are interesting, at least until the passing of the U.S. Patriot Act after which the legal gymnastics or fear of jail time no longer were particularly potent concerns. Bamford's writing style mostly mirror's Sergeant Joe Friday's "just the facts" dry, short, sharp, jargon-heavy sentences. Beneath his Tom Clancy fascination with the ways and means of spycraft lies, if not a liberal, at least someone left of center. The NSA plays provides him plenty of fodder by offering many tales of dishonesty, incompetence and ineffectiveness. The main problems revolve around the human factor of spying. After money flooded into the agency post-9/11, the agency began capturing tidal waves of data and hiring tens of thousands of people to analyze it. However, the pedabytes of data (Bamford fetishizes storage capacity as other men might obsess over bra sizes) represent an Everest size haystack secreting an undersized needle. Further, the actual terrorist-stopping data sits in Arabic, which perhaps 80 people among the tens of thousands of NSA operatives can translate. Given multiple Arabic dialects and the problem of yielding information from the data captured by supercomputers from fiber optic cable intercepts becomes largely insurmountable. Instead the agency diverts itself with monitoring the personal lives of non-governmental organizations employees calling the spouse back home. The best story involves the search for Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction". The Cheney administration engages their inside agent Ahmad Chalabi to fax a report to another official about such weapons knowing the NSA would intercept it and report it immediately to the president thus providing needed evidence. Unfortunately no one on duty the evening the fax came in could translate it and thus it sat until the administration rang up to see if "anything new happened to have come in". In relating these story Bramford's tone remains mostly respectful and he avoids exaggeration. In short, people should read this tightly written and comprehensive story to better understand what really happens in the world.