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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. This book could have been a lot smaller. 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. It seems to be more obfuscation than information. James Bamford has become required reading.
Bamford has used interviews for some of the information in the book. The balance of the book is a jumble. When he does he sometimes records the information then immediately repeats the same information in quotes. 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. Bamford's writing seems to illustrate this point. 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 latest work on the NSA is divided into 5 parts. It is as if separate essays were written and then edited into their current form. I have no interest in the color of a fence in Afghanistan or other such useless facts. The first part is a retelling of the attacks of 9-11. Many parts in the later portions of the book are repeats of earlier portions. The presentation is balanced and presents some NSA successes and NSA failures.
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. Although the information is presented coherently, the facts don't necessarily flow from one to another.
It brings back great memories. As a retired Agent, I can't get enough to read about the NSA.
Will we be able to control technology for good use or will it totally enslave us. 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 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. A lot of data mining companies are from Israel and are closely tied to Israeli intelligence. 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. Attorney General Ashcroft and other high level bureaucrats eventually refused to keep renewing the program every forty five days because of its illegality. Congress has tried to rein in some of NSA's violations of privacy with only partial success. Bamford's Shadow Factory has some good narratives and some tedious details about how the NSA works, which could have been summarized more.
After many threatened to resign if warrantless wiretapping were to continue, the president backed down over Cheney's objections. As I understand it, these Israeli companies are still doing data mining for the United States and have all our communication systems bugged. 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. 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. I liked the story about how the terrorists planned 911 in the US and in NSA's hometown of Laurel, Maryland. --Embarrassing stuff. Or do you want a free and open society that is somewhat dangerous, or a safe society that is totally oppressive.
One of NSA's problems is that they gather so much data; they have trouble filtering through all of it. One Israeli company called Comverse had a president that was accused of criminal charges that he would have to do several years time for. Bamford covers the data mining companies. Should we restrict certain people from being in our society if they come from a hostile culture.
Do you want security or privacy. What good is security, if it takes all your freedoms away. The book brings up questions about how much freedom and privacy a society should have as opposed to being secure. 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.
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. Private data mining companies will sell their services to any government no matter how oppressive. Bush, Cheney, and Gonzalez supported warrantless wiretapping of the American public, which is illegal. This illegal cooperation with spying has a long history.
- Revisionist Rich Salzer,Moyock, North Carolina, USA I highly recommend everybody get-ting this book, Bamford's best to date. 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.
Very interesting. 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.
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