Press Release: The Shadow Factory by James Bamford

http://doubleday.com/2008/10/13/press-release-the-shadow-factory-by-james-bamford/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
On-sale date: October 14, 2008
Contact: Todd Doughty

New York Times bestselling author James Bamford, America’s foremost expert on the National Security Agency, returns with an explosive report of the NSA’s complete transformation since 9/11 in THE SHADOW FACTORY: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (Doubleday; October 14, 2008; $27.95).

Bamford revealed the existence of the National Security Agency in the 1980s in The Puzzle Palace, and since then has consistently been the most tenacious and acclaimed writer on the agency. Since 9/11 and the revelations of a secret spying program devised by the Bush White House and conducted by the NSA, Bamford has been hailed for his investigations into possible misdeeds by the administration, including the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his piece “The Man Who Sold The War,” which appeared in Rolling Stone. With THE SHADOW FACTORY Bamford expands on his reportage to shed new light on how the agency grapples with shadowy new enemies in the war on terror, and in so doing, has turned its high-tech gaze within America’s borders, making our nation a powerful surveillance state.

The NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program is one of the most important and controversial news stories in many years. Even today, neither Congress nor the courts can decide on whether the program is legal, whether it should go on, and whether the telecommunications companies should be sued for perhaps billions of dollars for illegal spying. Yet despite all the news coverage, virtually no one outside of NSA knows anything about the secret program – how it works, how pervasive it is, and whose communications are being tapped. THE SHADOW FACTORY answers those questions and many more for the first time, including how NSA missed discovering the attack on 9/11 before it happened.

For half a century, the NSA fought a war against a giant nation with fixed military bases, a sophisticated communications network, a stable chain of command and a long history from which future intentions could be anticipated. No longer. Bamford shows how NSA’s missteps leading up to 9/11 made it abandon its decades-long reluctance to spy on anyone within America’s borders. Since 9/11, fear of another attack has changed all that. Today’s terrorist enemies are stateless and constantly on the move, their organizational structures are always in flux, and when they do communicate, their infrequent messages join with billions of other pieces of communication—email, cell phone calls, and data transfers, all moving around the world at the speed of light in a complex stream of information. To succeed against twenty-first century targets, the agency is undergoing a metamorphosis—described in vivid detail—that is changing both its culture and its technology.

THE SHADOW FACTORY is organized into two parts: first, a gripping narrative of how NSA missed a chance to thwart two of the 9/11 hijackers once they reached our shores, and second, a detailed portrait of how NSA has tried to make sure that will never happen again. With an exacting level of detail and previously unreported sources, Bamford reveals exactly how every American’s data is being mined–every phone call and email—and by whom, and what is being done with it. Any reader who thinks America’s liberties are being protected by Congress will be shocked and appalled at what is revealed in THE SHADOW FACTORY.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JAMES BAMFORD, the author of the bestsellers Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace as well as A Pretext for War, has written extensively on national security issues for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harpers, Rolling Stone and many others. His Rolling Stone article “The Man Who Sold The War” won the 2006 National Magazine Award for Reporting, and has been optioned by Hollywood for a feature film. 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. where he writes and produces documentaries for PBS NOVA.

THE SHADOW FACTORY: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
James Bamford
Doubleday
On-sale date: October 14, 2008
$27.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-52132-1

NEWSBREAKS IN THE SHADOW FACTORY INCLUDE:

* Bamford details how NSA picked up the very first clue to the 9/11 attacks by eavesdropping on a house in Yemen that served as Osama bin Laden’s operations center—and then dropped the ball. Despite intercepting communications between the Yemen ops center and the terrorists in San Diego for nearly a year, the agency never realized that they were actually in the U.S.

* Bamford explains how the terrorists were able to set up their final base of operations almost next door to NSA Headquarters and communicate with the Middle East without NSA even having a clue. Thus, as the agency was searching the world for the terrorists, they were almost within eyesight of the director’s eighth-floor office in Laurel, Maryland, NSA’s “company town.” For nearly a month, the terrorists worked out in the same gyms, ate at the same fast-food restaurants, and shopped at the same supermarkets as the eavesdroppers at NSA. At the same time senior officials at NSA were meeting to discuss how to locate them, Mohammed Atta and many of the others were just across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway meeting to finalize their plans and sending money and messages back to the Middle East at the local Kinkos and Safeway.

* Bamford shows how, following the attacks and the White House order to begin warrantless eavesdropping, NSA began a massive expansion and for the first time since the early 1970s, began turning its giant parabolic antennas inward in the American people. Bamford reveals a very secret listening post in Georgia, near the South Carolina border, that began eavesdropping on the communications of Americans—including journalists engaged in intimate conversations with their spouses – without a warrant and without any indication of terrorism. This was all done remotely—with hidden antennas in the Middle East controlled by the NSA “voice interceptors” at the Georgia listening post. Bamford shows how the eavesdroppers sit at their stations, often with two earphones on each ear listening to four frequencies at the same time, while hitting recorders, scanning for signals and typing out transcripts. Bamford also chillingly describes how the NSA picked up the satellite phone call of a terrorist driving with others in a remote part of Yemen. Within seconds of recognizing his voice, they notified the CIA, which had a Predator drone in the area and fired a missile killing the caller and five other occupants of the car—including an American citizen. It was the NSA’s first assassination.

* Bamford tells how NSA, because of changing technology, must now work out secret and potentially illegal agreements with the telecom industry in order to get access to both domestic U.S. communications and much of the world’s phone calls and e-mail. The NSA and the industry—principally Verizon and AT&T—secretly work together to tap into the company’s key trunk lines. And in what will likely come as a shock to many, the companies have outsourced the actual tapping to several little known foreign companies. These companies have the capability to remotely tap into what amounts to virtually the entire U.S. telecom system from anywhere in the world. The founder and former CEO of one of these companies is now a fugitive from the U.S. hiding out in Africa, and the general counsel and other executives have been charged with theft, money laundering and other crimes. Yet despite this track record and their foreign connections, the telecom companies continue to have secret access to much of America’s most private communications.

* Bamford illustrates the many ways in which NSA gains access to much of the world’s communications. A key way is by gaining access to the major Internet “switches,” both in the U.S. and around the world. For example, there is a fortress-like building on a downtown street in Miami that has no name and no windows, yet 90 percent of all Caribbean, Central American and South American communications pass through it. Even a call made across the same South American town will likely be routed through the Miami building. Thus, with access to the building—run by a private company—NSA would have instant access to the communications, both phone and Internet, for an entire continent. The same is true for much of Africa’s communications—it passes through a single switch overseas. Bamford also reveals how the NSA makes secret agreements with these companies for access. And for those cables where it can’t gain company cooperation, it has a specially built submarine designed to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor and tap into foreign cables.

* Bamford discusses how, once NSA has collected it all, the agency engages in sophisticated data mining techniques as it looks for links between callers and e-mail recipients. NSA is setting up a secret new data center in Texas with over 1,200 personnel to store and mine billions of communications. Interestingly, it is just a few miles from where Microsoft is also building a very large data center of exactly the same size. Under current law, NSA could gain access to Microsoft’s stored data without even a warrant—just a short fiber optic cable. To some, data mining produces about as much intelligence as reading tea leaves but others argue it could have provided the clue that might have led investigators to 9/11. Finally, Bamford explores how useful the entire enterprise—both eavesdropping and data mining—really is. For all the money and loss of privacy, is anything worthwhile coming from it? How many terrorist incidents has the program actually stopped, if any? And where does it end—with everyone’s phone calls, e-mail and Internet searches stored forever in some windowless Texas building?

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Mother Jones: Of all the things the Bush administration leaves behind, what's the hardest one to fix?

James Bamford: The hardest thing to fix will be the reputation of the United States around the world. It'll probably take a generation before it gets back to where it was in the pre-Bush years. The US is now seen by a lot of people as the Soviet Union of the 21st century, and undoing that will be key. If we want to prevent terrorism in the future we've got to change the image of the US as a country that doesn't regard anybody else's views around the world and answers every question with evasion. If we get an Obama presidency, it might speed things up a bit.

MJ: Are any easier to fix?

JB: There are a couple fairly easy fixes if the new president decides to work with Congress, and Congress decides to work with the president. There's a number that can be fixed simply by revoking laws that were enacted during the Bush administration. Recently, for example, the court ruled against the administration on detainee rights in Guantanamo. The Congress under the Republicans had passed a law taking away the right of habeas corpus to those people. An easy fix: Restore the right of habeas corpus by throwing out the previous Congress' law and bringing it back to the way it was pre-Bush administration. A number of these things were done by the Bush administration, and if the new president cooperates with a like-minded Congress, they could get rid of the bad laws and reinstate the good laws.

http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2008/09/fix-it-interview-james-bamford.html