The National Security Agency is the largest, most costly, and most technologically advanced spy organization the world has ever known. It is also the most intrusive, secretly filtering millions of phone calls and e-mails an hour in the United States and around the world. Half a million people live on its watch list, and the number grows by the thousands every month. Has America become a surveillance state?
In The Shadow Factory, James Bamford, the foremost expert on the National Security Agency, charts its transformation since 9/11, as the legendary code breakers turned their ears away from outside enemies, such as the Soviet Union, and inward to enemies whose communications increasingly crisscross America. Bamford, who first exposed the top-secret NSA in his bestselling book The Puzzle Palace, now tells the full story of the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping operation--a program so illegal it caused the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the FBI director to threaten to resign because of it.
Bamford closely follows several of the 9/11 hijackers as they lived, plotted, and traveled in the United States for nearly two years--all the while regularly communicating with Osama bin Laden's operations center in the Middle East. Incredibly, under Director Michael Hayden, the NSA was listening in--but never alerted anyone that the suspected terrorists were in America. Bamford shows how a chastened Hayden then went to the opposite extreme, turning his agency loose on thousands of American citizens without the required judicial warrants, monitoring businesspeople and journalists, often recording "incredibly intimate, personal conversations."
Bamford depicts the major American telecommunications firms meekly complying with NSA demands as they turn over their network traffic without court orders. He reveals that the monitoring has been outsourced by the telecoms to overseas firms with links to foreign intelligence organizations--and with the potential to remotely access U.S. data from outside the country. And he shows how new technology, the NSA's lack of oversight, and billions in post-9/11 dollars have combined to give the agency an almost Orwellian ability to eavesdrop. Nevertheless, many insiders believe the NSA has become Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," where the entire world's knowledge is stored but not a single word understood.
Fast-paced and riveting, The Shadow Factory is about a world unseen by Americans without the highest security clearances. But it is a world in which even their most intimate whispers may no longer be private.
Editorial Reviews
“Extraordinary....A galvanizing narrative brimming with heretofore undisclosed details.” —The New York Times Book Review
“With a flair and clarity that rivals those of the best spy novelists, Bamford has created a masterpiece of investigative reporting.” —Publishers Weekly
“Important and disturbing....This revealing and provocative book is necessary reading...Bamford goes where the 9/11 Commission did not fully go.” —Senator Bob Kerrey, The Washington Post Book World
“Engaging....Chilling....Bamford is able to link disparate facts and paint a picture of utter, compounded failure—failure to find the NSA’s terrorist targets and failure to protect American citizens’ communications from becoming tangled in a dragnet.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
James Bamford is the bestselling author of Body of Secrets, The Puzzle Palace, and A Pretext for War, and has written on national security for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. His Rolling Stone article “The Man Who Sold the War” won the 2006 National Magazine Award for reporting. Formerly the Washington investigative producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and a distinguished visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Bamford lives in Washington, D.C., and in London.
