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mburnamfink 's review for:
Intelligence journalism is an odd trade, writing on people who would prefer to keep everything classified forever. And this book from 2008, prior to Edward Snowden's revelations, is very much a peace of history, that while dated is still worth reading.
Bamford tracks three major threads. The first is the absolute failure of the NSA to connect the dots on 9/11. Various parts of the US intelligence apparatus knew something was coming, but despite copious intercepts, they were unable to figure out that these terrorists were inside the United States and communicating with an Al Qaeda safehouse in Yemen. Most startling to me was how Tom Wilshire, a CIA liaison to the FBI, halted alerts on the 9/11 plots several times in the months prior.
The planes hit the towers, and the NSA went to war. This is the second thread, an effort spearheaded by the Bush administration and Dick Cheney to void legal protections against arbitrary wiretapping that had been set up in the 70s. The careful charade of FISA warrants was cast aside in terms of national security letters and persons of interest. Now the NSA could listen in for almost any reason, justified retroactively. Thousands of rapidly surged analysts and translators spent hours a day in complexes in Georgia, listening to every phone call in Iraq. The first Bush-Cheney system almost went down due to the surprising resistance of a senior FBI agent named James Comey (famous later for other reason), but a Democratic congress eventually passed a national security wishlist, for fear of looking weak on terrorism.
The third challenge is technical. The NSA's job used to be very easy when signals moved over radio or electrical cables. With the internet and fiber optic boom in the 90s, what the NSA could eavesdrop on fell precipitously, until they invested in a series of expensive public-private partnerships to design high capacity splitters and place them in major internet nodes, essentially suctioning everything transmitted across the internet into a shadow realm of NSA data centers for analysis. The NSA was big data before big data was hip. But the NSA was drowning in data, unable to turn even an infinitesimal bit of into actionable intelligence. This is where a host of Orwellian programs to develop a digital analyst come into play: Trailblazer, Turbulence, Total Information Awareness. But America's cyber spooks were hamstrung by more mundane concerns. When the book was written, the master 'No Fly' list was kept on an Oracle database, and due to interoperability problems, names had to be printed off and retyped on secondary systems. I've worked with some janky software, but nothing that bad.
The pieces of information in this book are fascinating, if obsolete, but where this book falls short is in analysis. The NSA is tremendously expensive, a multibillion dollar agency with deep pockets. Yet it's hard to point to successes, terrorist plots stopped and lives saved. Similarly, the ability of the NSA to listen in on everybody is a shotgun pointed at the head of American democracy, but the harms also seem pretty theoretical. This is 2020, we ask our wiretaps for pancake recipes, take selfies in front of blazing police cars, and run for political office while espousing conspiracy gibberish about satanic cabals of child murderers. What could the NSA do that isn't "seen it already?".
Don't answer that. I've read Stross' The Laundry series.
Bamford tracks three major threads. The first is the absolute failure of the NSA to connect the dots on 9/11. Various parts of the US intelligence apparatus knew something was coming, but despite copious intercepts, they were unable to figure out that these terrorists were inside the United States and communicating with an Al Qaeda safehouse in Yemen. Most startling to me was how Tom Wilshire, a CIA liaison to the FBI, halted alerts on the 9/11 plots several times in the months prior.
The planes hit the towers, and the NSA went to war. This is the second thread, an effort spearheaded by the Bush administration and Dick Cheney to void legal protections against arbitrary wiretapping that had been set up in the 70s. The careful charade of FISA warrants was cast aside in terms of national security letters and persons of interest. Now the NSA could listen in for almost any reason, justified retroactively. Thousands of rapidly surged analysts and translators spent hours a day in complexes in Georgia, listening to every phone call in Iraq. The first Bush-Cheney system almost went down due to the surprising resistance of a senior FBI agent named James Comey (famous later for other reason), but a Democratic congress eventually passed a national security wishlist, for fear of looking weak on terrorism.
The third challenge is technical. The NSA's job used to be very easy when signals moved over radio or electrical cables. With the internet and fiber optic boom in the 90s, what the NSA could eavesdrop on fell precipitously, until they invested in a series of expensive public-private partnerships to design high capacity splitters and place them in major internet nodes, essentially suctioning everything transmitted across the internet into a shadow realm of NSA data centers for analysis. The NSA was big data before big data was hip. But the NSA was drowning in data, unable to turn even an infinitesimal bit of into actionable intelligence. This is where a host of Orwellian programs to develop a digital analyst come into play: Trailblazer, Turbulence, Total Information Awareness. But America's cyber spooks were hamstrung by more mundane concerns. When the book was written, the master 'No Fly' list was kept on an Oracle database, and due to interoperability problems, names had to be printed off and retyped on secondary systems. I've worked with some janky software, but nothing that bad.
The pieces of information in this book are fascinating, if obsolete, but where this book falls short is in analysis. The NSA is tremendously expensive, a multibillion dollar agency with deep pockets. Yet it's hard to point to successes, terrorist plots stopped and lives saved. Similarly, the ability of the NSA to listen in on everybody is a shotgun pointed at the head of American democracy, but the harms also seem pretty theoretical. This is 2020, we ask our wiretaps for pancake recipes, take selfies in front of blazing police cars, and run for political office while espousing conspiracy gibberish about satanic cabals of child murderers. What could the NSA do that isn't "seen it already?".
Don't answer that. I've read Stross' The Laundry series.