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It is as if separate essays were written and then edited into their current form. This latest work on the NSA is divided into 5 parts. Bamford's writing seems to illustrate this point. The balance of the book is loosely organized into sections on the NSA history, NSA's growth, the corresponding growth of an intelligence industry devoted to eavesdropping and spying, and the future for the NSA.
I have no interest in the color of a fence in Afghanistan or other such useless facts. The retelling of the 9-11 story is just a rehash of the official story, Except for the naming of two government programs or operations, this first part of the book could be skipped. The balance of the book is a jumble. James Bamford has become required reading. When he does he sometimes records the information then immediately repeats the same information in quotes. I found myself alternating feelings of sympathy for NSA's struggle to overcome the obstacles it faces to shock at some of the actions it has taken.In his introduction Bamford states that the NSA will have the capability to store enough information to fill a 30 foot tall stack of books for every man, woman and child on earth.
Many parts in the later portions of the book are repeats of earlier portions. The writing sometimes degenerates into useless minutia, like when Bamford not only gives the phone number for Bin Laden's satelite phone number but then goes on to state which parts of the number refers to the country code, and international code, etc.
This book could have been a lot smaller. The first part is a retelling of the attacks of 9-11.
It seems to be more obfuscation than information. Although the information is presented coherently, the facts don't necessarily flow from one to another.
The presentation is balanced and presents some NSA successes and NSA failures. Bamford has used interviews for some of the information in the book.
The reader is made to sift through a lot of useless and repetitious information to get to the facts, which is the same thing that the NSA finds itself doing.
As a retired Agent, I can't get enough to read about the NSA. It brings back great memories.
--Embarrassing stuff. People do not know that they are on the list. Another violation of privacy has been that phone and internet companies willingly let the NSA spy on their lines on everyone. As usual, the FBI, CIA, and NSA before 9-11 had trouble communicating and cooperating with one another due to rivalries, jealousies, and clashing ambitions over power and jurisdiction, which lead to security breaches.Bamford covers the violations against civil liberties after 9-11 in attempts to capture terrorists. One Israeli company called Comverse had a president that was accused of criminal charges that he would have to do several years time for.
After many threatened to resign if warrantless wiretapping were to continue, the president backed down over Cheney's objections. If the NSA had not been overly cautious about violating civil liberties before 911, the terrorists could have been caught without breaking laws protecting civil liberties. Bush, Cheney, and Gonzalez supported warrantless wiretapping of the American public, which is illegal. The book brings up questions about how much freedom and privacy a society should have as opposed to being secure. I liked the story about how the terrorists planned 911 in the US and in NSA's hometown of Laurel, Maryland.
The NSA sends letters to communications companies demanding information on a targeted client and the company cannot reject the request or say anything about it. He fled from New York to Israel to Namibia trying to escape the jail time, but was eventually caught.Bamford covers NSA's problems, practices and foes. As I understand it, these Israeli companies are still doing data mining for the United States and have all our communication systems bugged. Attorney General Ashcroft and other high level bureaucrats eventually refused to keep renewing the program every forty five days because of its illegality.
This illegal cooperation with spying has a long history. Or do you want a free and open society that is somewhat dangerous, or a safe society that is totally oppressive. Bamford's Shadow Factory has some good narratives and some tedious details about how the NSA works, which could have been summarized more. One of NSA's problems is that they gather so much data; they have trouble filtering through all of it. But their watch list keeps growing to hundreds of thousands of people as they put people on the list who have any contact with their prime suspects. Congress has tried to rein in some of NSA's violations of privacy with only partial success. Private data mining companies will sell their services to any government no matter how oppressive. Should we restrict certain people from being in our society if they come from a hostile culture.
But the director of the NSA was afraid that the NSA would be prosecuted for civil rights violations, so the NSA played it safe until 9-11. Will we be able to control technology for good use or will it totally enslave us. Bamford covers the data mining companies. A lot of data mining companies are from Israel and are closely tied to Israeli intelligence. Do you want security or privacy. What good is security, if it takes all your freedoms away.
Author James Bamford does yeoman workhere showing the paranoia and dictat-orial excesses of the 'Pres. Dubya'criminal regime without all the MikeMoore cloak-and-dagger/leftist Propa-ganda, not that Fahrenheit 9-11 wasall bad [see my review on that andall my reviews here on amazon dot com].The National Security Administrationmissed tracking two of the (alledged)9-11 hijackers and this led to the 'make up' call of the surveillanceof many average Amer-I-cans and databeing collected on all of us behindour backs for 'National Security', blah-blah. I highly recommend everybody get-ting this book, Bamford's best to date. - Revisionist Rich Salzer,Moyock, North Carolina, USA
An excellent discussion of the disconnect between the different US intelligence agencies in the run up to 9/11, and scary information about the erosion of US civil liberties and the types of programs that the NSA are engaged in. Very interesting.
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