Customer Reviews

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

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This is the latest book by James Bamford about what is usually called the "super secret" National Security Agency (NSA). Bamford has established himself as the public chronicler of the NSA and has done some impressive reporting on an agency famous for its almost impenetrable secrecy.

First it should be noted that much of the secrecy that envelopes NSA is absolutely justified. The intelligence cliché' of `protecting sources and methods' has real meaning within the Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) of the agency. The ability to collect and process electronic signals carrying important information is actually quite fragile and can be easily lost through inadvertent or ill-considered disclosure. Such losses have occurred far too often and do adversely affect U.S. National Security.

That being said it is also true that the blanket of secrecy can also be used to conceal incompetence, ill-legal activities, and enormous waste. This is why congressional and executive branch oversight are so important in keeping the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) honest. Unfortunately, NSA is a `technical' collection agency which means that the eyes of its nominal monitors tend to glaze over when its programs are discussed in any detail. This situation was exacerbated by NSA's former director General Hayden who was able to walk that thin line between telling congress what it wanted to hear and avoiding any real involvement in NSA operations.

This is why Bamford's books in general and this latest one in particular are so important. He is not accurate in every thing he reports about NSA nor do his informants understand all of the technical issues. Yet overall this book is a service to the cause of good government and raises a host of red flags that ought to be looked into by congress.

In this book he discusses three inter-related issues: first, there is the failure of NSA, CIA and the FBI to share vital information prior to 9/11 and their collective failures to effectively analyze available data; second, there is NSA's reluctant but undoubted subversion of Constitutional rights of privacy accorded to all in the U.S. both citizens and visitors; and finally there is the festering problem of the use of contractors for core missions by all of the agencies of the IC and the general haze of corruption hanging over all government contracting processes. NSA appears to have some particularly serious issues in this regard.

When any government or part of government operates behind a curtain secrecy with ineffective oversight it is an invitation to corruption and abuse of power. Bamford has done his best to shine a light on this aspect of NSA.

Of what?

Of all sorts of stuff, James Bamford makes clear:
* NSA incompetence;
* NSA politicization
* Telecoms' long history, well before 9/11, of willingness to illegally become NSA lackeys;
* NSA data overload;
* NSA privatization of ever-more functions;
* A largely bipartisan sign-off on all this;
* And, though not directly addressed by Bamford, the flip side of unifying all intelligence services under a DNI.

Following uyp on his previous investigations of the National Security Agency, Bamford has two themes here -- the post-9/11 and Islamic-world threat NSA's growth and strategy, or lack thereof; and, the post-Internet rise attempts to not only gather communications, but process, crunch and analyze them.

Beyond looking at the NSA's snooping, especialy when taking a look ahead to the future, Bamford asks what this means in possible further attacks on civil liberties; new NSA programs; NSA future demands for computing and electric power; and more.

A must read.

Bamford opens by telling us that by 2008 NSA had become the most intrusive spy organization, secretly filtering millions of phone calls and e-mails/hour, programmed to listen for thousands of names and phone numbers. The watch list once contained 20 names - now its 500,000.

He then goes on to calmly describe how airport screening was easily evaded - true, a number of the 9/11 hijackers were given extra screening, but they had no explosives and their knives were less than 4" long. Pilots were ordered to place their aircraft on autopilot when the flights were taken over, and to move to the rear of the aircraft. The hijackers then turned off the airplanes' transponders, making them invisible to ground controllers.

Ironically, just as the NSA was becoming alarmed over the realization that some terrorists (and hijackers) were in the U.S., several of them were amidst NSA employees in local shops and on local highways near the agency.

Prior to 9/11, NSA head General Hayden had scaled back its intrusiveness out of fear of another Senator Church-type investigation. The NSA had been eavesdropping on them for years (without comprehension of what they were doing), and refused to pass information onto other agencies.

After 9/11 a secret program within the agency began, using an estimated 80-90 outside civilians that ignored FISA warrant requirements. Some objected, claiming that FISA requirements would not impede terrorist surveillance (eg. the warrant could be obtained as late as 72-hours after the fact, and were rarely refused), while Hayden pointed out that the forms and processing took time, and Cheney's Addington was outraged that under Bush II it had become a bit less than a rubber stamp.

Bamford goes on to reveal outcomes of these relaxed standards - considerable listening to private conversations between American military in Iraq and their families, etc. Also there is the strong possibility that those listening to conversations misjudge the intent (eg. An Iraqi says he's planning to deliver a load of melons - that may or may not be code for IEDs, and any erroneous decisions made on this limited information by those listening in (generally with limited Arabic fluency) bring harm or death to those involved.

Even more frustrating is that it is impossible to determine what is legal vs. illegal since NSA conduct is now governed by secret rules. Regardless, millions (possibly billions) are wasted as career CIA and NSA employees are hired by private contractors and placed back at their old jobs (often doing very little of potential value), computer systems between the CIA and National Counter-Terrorism Center are incompatable, and the entire intelligence system lacks accountability.

Frustrating NSA, on the other hand, was the fact that much international communications traffic to/from the U.S. is carried on fiber-optic cables - difficult/impossible to wiretap. This has led to NSA agreements with phone companies to divert cable traffic so that NSA could listen in.

All these conversations are recorded and stored in a new NSA facility in Texas. Readers are left wondering where this will all end and how much money is wasted.

NSA can vacuum clean just about everything going over telcom, and indeed has been doing it. Bamford confirms this is not a paranoid nightmare, but an operational reality. He diligently details how and where NSA has spliced into telcom and internet centers, and whose technology they are using - prominently among them Israeli companies closely tied to that nation's intelligence agencies. Bamford strongly implies that these companies, including Narus and Verint, have a backdoor into everything NSA is vacuuming up.

Bamford's book could well be used in preparing prosecution cases against NSA officials including former Director Michael Hayden, who pushed into warrantless wiretapping post-911. What Hayden et al did, prodded by Bush and Cheney, was to basically set up the facilities to mass suck virtually everything that went over telcom or internet. While this has been exposed, the current status of these operations is unclear. But it seems a pretty safe bet to assume that from somewhere, Big Ears are listening.

Bamford is the great historian of NSA. His "Puzzle Palace" was the first extensive revelation of the agency. "Shadow Factory" is the best current telling of the NSA story. He underscores that the technology exists for total surveillance. The agency's greatest current difficulty, actually interpreting the information flow, is being addressed with super-fast computers and advanced software coming on line in the next few years. So if the ability of the big ears to actually track all conversations and messages for keywords is not quite here, it will be soon. And by the way, it appears that voiceprint programs will be able to pick out anyone's unique signature out of millions of calls. Yeah, it's "Enemy of the State," and it's real.

My conclusion - Americans must make a choice between maintaining a global empire or restoring their personal privacy. It's that stark.

Bamford's latest book is certainly well researched, and comes to some alarming conclusions: Israel has virtually bugged the entire world, and our government colludes with them in handing over all of our most private information, contrary to all of our laws and safeguards against such things. It is patently illegal, but is done anyway.

The scope of the illegal activity, and the disregard for our Constitution that permeates these actions induce more terror in me than anything "our enemies" may try to do to us. We are officially in a police state, no matter how they spin it.

This is the book on which PBS based its DVD 'The Spy Factory'. The Shadow Factory goes into far more detail than the DVD.

Presented here in is exactly how your tax money is spent so that a few public servants and apparently Israel can know precisely what you do think and say.

Looks like at one time they collected so much info they didn't know what to do with it. BUT I bet by now all you have to do is enter some tid-bit about you and a computer serves it up in seconds. In fact I have reason to KNOW that it's possible. I've tested it a few times and I KNOW you can do it. Disgusting. This is what you do with a high I.Q.and a lot of somebody else's money. What a hoot.

Two stories stand out for me from the this text, neither of which I believe - in one an Al-Qaeda suspect was travelling in a car in Yemen in November 2002. Too astute to use a phone himself, one of his companions used a satellite phone, and the suspect was overheard by the NSA giving the car driver directions as the phone conversation went on. The NSA operator recognized the suspects voice , a predator drone happened to be in the area and forty minutes later all five occupants of the car were dead. In the other story, during the initial `shock and awe' bombing of Iraq, an NSA operative was monitoring phone calls of American aid workers in the region, who were calling their headquarters every 20 minutes, to give their location. The book indicates that the NSA were passing on this information to the bombers to keep the aid workers safe.
I found the first story too flimsy to be true - would it be possible to have a predator handy? Would the order to kill the people in the car be given on such a light identification? On the second, I remember that the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kovoso incident*, so I'm not sure the bombers were that responsive to location advice. It also turns out that the NSA was/maybe still is forbidden from monitoring calls by US citizens.

Anyway, the book is quite revealing about the legal justifications for the NSA's activities. In 1974, after Watergate, the NSA was forbidden from monitoring American's abroad, without authorisation, and it interpreted its restrictions as meaning that it could not monitoring incoming calls into the US for the same reason. However Bamford shows that, in fact, the NSA worked with the phone companies , on an informal understanding, to monitor traffic on an ongoing basis.
One of the major surprises for me was that satellite communication is rather redundant (or is it? Maybe the book is a blind alley) and that most communications now go in discrete packets over fibre optic cable. So cable monitoring is a huge part of what the NSA does, and because fibre is very densely packed, its no longer a matter of just fitting a `collar' onto the copper cable - ( I was friendly with guys who used to get `free cable' TV, so I saw how this used to work). I took a lot from the book about the complexity and sheer difficulty of monitoring all voice and data communications for specific words, and selecting those for analysis later. there are billions of communications which must be sifted, in many languages with hundreds of dialects, the people your after will be using code ... it gets mindboggling.
The book seems to be written in episodes - and different views of what the NSA should be doing come across. There's a detailed description of the fact that the NSA monitored the 9/11 attackers on their way into the US, but stopped listening as they entered Los Angeles, and did not inform the FBI for fear of being seen to monitor within the US. This, in my view, is lamentable and the book agrees. The NSA director - Hayden, is initially seen as blunt and effective, but later is described as bending with the political wind and going to far in eavesdropping within the US. I couldn't form a clear opinion on what Bamford's view is. There is a lot in the book about how the industrial-security complex is very powerful, very wasteful and very threatening. There is potentially alarming stuff about some of the work being privatised to private companies,some of which are foreign (the Israelis get a particular bashing, as usual), there is a lot of concern about the NSA's unwillingness to be bound by legal constraints.

So overall I liked the technical part of the book, but I couldn't get a handle on whether it a call to arms in defence of civil liberties or a call for more rational monitoring.
* Since I wrote this review, I have read (in the Sunday Times world pages i.e. as near to an MI6 press release as you are likely to get) that the NSA had evidence of a Serbian team which was being sheltered in the Chinese embassy during the conflict. The US bombed the embassy and apologized for the 'mistake' in order not to completely embarrass the Chinese.

From assisted assassinations to the bureaucratic mess accompanying intelligence sharing, The Shadow Factory details a plot as subtextual as it is devastating: that agents in the government, particularly neo-conservatives, lied, ignored, distorted, and assuaged their way into the most monumental (and I have to assume most egregious) aggrandizement of executive authority in US history. While the account is intriguing, and the report is obviously based around facts, the author seems to fall victim to some of his own criticisms.

Most notably: distortion.

There are two particular instances to which I wish to call attention. First is his brief detailing of the CIA/MI6 overthrow of Mossedeq in Iran in the 50s. The US has already admitted guilt to the coup, though the portrayal in the book seems to miss the fact that the Shah was already head of state, and Mossedeq, the popularly elected prime-minister, could have been replaced at the whim of the Shah. Tic-tac, sure, though the edge to the more ignorant cuts a trench which they are unlikely to dig out of; to wit: those with a liberal bias would believe that the Shah wasn't institutionalized in Iran prior to the coup that overthrew Mossedeq, however the prevailing view among Iranians of the Shah, prior to Mossadeq's ousting, was that of tepid indifference, if distrustful. Also, it must be noted, Shah of Iran has a history predating the US, so his occupancy was assumed, if disliked (or criticized a la Ruhollah Khomeinei).

Second is that the author refers to the assassination of international actors as illegal as per US law. I believe the author is referring to Executive Order 12333, which bars intelligence officers from planning the assassination or overthrowing of an already established political entity or actor, including, but not limited to, kings, high-ranking politicians, presidents, prime-ministers, etc. This stipulation, a remnant from the Church CIA investigations of the 70s, does not apply to non-state, inter-state, or other actors, especially agents intending to harm US/US interests (for example, CIA and other covert intelligence officers have been actively engaging in murder, particularly of terrorists, since the establishment of the CIA in the 40s, and this trend was not halted in the 80s).

These distortions prove bothersome to me. While I want to accept the author at his word for the rest of the text, knowing what I do of his critical tone and glossing of facts seems to impute, whether factually or not, motives which can only be characterized as politically expedient.

I would love to provide a detailed analysis of the facts presented by the author, I can only provide what I know. Aforementioned factual errors make this --admittedly intriguing-- account of the NSA dubious, to the point that the reader will ultimately be shoehorned into assuming all the authors claims strident.

If only there were an account not tainted with political bias. We get it, the Bush administration was chock-full of criminals. There is enough evidence to support this claim without having to rely on historically inaccurate and factually fallacious material (all in some inane attempt to buoy some blooming-come-radicalized half cooked political ideology). So, if nothing else, take this book for what it purports to be, a narrative of history, with a misuse of facts. It is a fun read, though I wouldn't recommend quoting it in any scholarly work --lest you be suspect to evincing the same hardline philosophy.

Bamford does an amazing job of taking very complicated issues and making them understandable. As a historian of intelligenc I can appreciate the work and dedication it took to bring this out. Every citizen of the US and the World should read this book, If you value freedom and the Constitution read it now.