The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 To The Eavesdropping On America (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
Not much to say, except it seems to me almost everything that whistle-blower Edward Snowdon 'uncovered' was available for years to whom ever wanted to read about it in this book. Before reading this, I was in the anti-NSA camp... Now I'm not so sure. In any case, the USA has lost what I feel is its core reason for being. We've given up our freedom since 9/11.Good book, none-the-less. If you would like know the details and to be frightened about Orwell’s “1984” having arrived this is the book to read. The book describes the development of warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA and others over from the 1970’s to 2008. The recent flap about wiretapping seems odd in that the extent of NSA surveillance is documented in this 2008 book.Bamford gives a detailed account of the mechanism of electronic surveillance including the addresses of buildings, phone #’s of terrorists including OBL, the types of equipment used, private companies involved. In the degree of detail it is astounding. After it was revealed in 1970’s that the NSA was involved in wire tapping of US citizens congress passed laws to prevent this abuse. Michael Hayden became head of the NSA in 1999 and instructed his organization not to share information with the FBI. As a result though the agency knew the names and phone #’s of two of the hijackers who had been to a meeting in Indonesia and knew that they were communicating with the main Al Qaeda communications center in Yemen and knew that they had passed through LAX they did not send it to the FBI because once the men entered the US they were not allowed to be NSA targets. For years The NSA collected calls from the Yemen ops center which was known as the Bin Laden's operational headquarters and the op center for the embassy bombing and the attack on the USS Cole. For years they collected calls from the center to the homes of the 9/11 planners in San Diego and yet never once did they track or find out what those calls were about. So was not technical difficulties that prevented the discovery of the 9/11 attacks but organizational, inter-service difficultiesAfter 9/11 all of that changed. G.W. Bush gave a secret order to allow the NSA to wiretap on US citizen. It was decided that the technological advances were so fast that the NSA would outsource a lot of their intelligence eavesdropping work just as previously they had outsourced the repair their copy machines. In October 2001 NSA had 55 contracts to 145 companies. In October 2002 it had 75,000 contracts to 7,197 contractors. Of the NSA budget of $60 billion 70 percent went to outside contractors creating a surveillance industrial complex.In 1994 law requires that telecommunication companies make their equipment able to be surveilled and even to install the surveillance equipment if asked by the NSA and never reveal its installation. The vast majority of network traffic into and out of South America and within South America itself comes through one switching station in a building in Miami, FL. Much of the traffic in the world in fact comes through the United States including some intra-African traffic. The British intelligence agency similar to NASA advertises for new employees inside computer games like Tom Clancy's splinter cell double agent. To get computer savvy recruits.President Bush authorized a to set up a nationwide surveillance system in Mexico similar to that in the United States where all electronic communications are vacuumed up and delivered to the Mexican government. Part of the contract was that this information would also be made available to the American government including calls to and from American citizens. This would be one way of the American government to do illegal surveillance on American citizens. In a country like Mexico with a long history of government abuse, torture and political imprisonments etc. this type of facilitating by the US would seem to aid those types of activities. Mexico had been doing this type of electronic surveillance previously and was caught and there was a uproar in the country about it. The US government’s response was to offer them a complete system similar to the one in the US which would monitor every call, every electronic message in a secure, secretive way. While there is security and supervision for government employees involved in government surveillance there is little oversight in the private companies they hire to subcontract. Of concern is that a lot of this surveillance equipment that is hardwired into the American electronic surveillance networks is tied to companies closely tied to Israeli intelligence services, for instance Per Se is an Israeli company that has voice recognition equipment that is used widely and the former Shin Bet director sits on its board. The company that provides the intercept device that does data mining in the US and most of the world is made and installed by Narus an Israeli firm headed by former Israeli intelligence officers. The co-owners of this company were arrested for embezzling millions of dollars from their shareholders. That the entire electronic communications in the United States was funneled through hardware that was owned by a private company with corrupt owners who had close ties with a foreign espionage agency shows how vulnerable this system is.Also this equipment has been sold and installed throughout the world's most repressive regimes to search web traffic and also to search the Internet so that regimes such as in Egypt, Vietnam and China install Narus equipment throughout their electronic communications infrastructure so they can zero in on particular words in communications.In 1975 when word of the NSA wiretapping became known Bella Abzug called hearings to investigate NSA and the telephone companies that cooperated with it. The government officials refused to testify and so Abzug turned and issued subpoenas to the telephone and Internet companies. In an unprecedented expansion of presidential power and at the urging of Cheney and Rumsfeld Bush called for extended the concept of executive privilege to private companies by insisting that the executives for reasons of national security should not testify. The also the author describes a new system being worked on: point. It can analyze huge amounts of data and come up with answers to questions that can analyze all the information electronic information about individuals from electronic location software, purchases, EZPass data, web pages, and the information on Facebook and MySpace. It is thought that this will eventually allow not only knowing what a person does but how they think. Some people working on this system have quit believing that it is too intrusive to be developed and used by a secretive system like the NSA. The essay is essentially trying to build the Hal 9000 from 2001 space Odyssey.Such a system loaded with newspaper information periodicals and huge amount of huge amounts of personal information sucked up by the NSA could eventually lead to a computer who could identify which people would most likely be opposed to a government project or might be most likely to join or support a certain group.I seems that almost everything that you (and most people around the world) do electronically is collected by the NSA and its’ collection ability is only getting better.
What do You think about The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 To The Eavesdropping On America (2008)?
Really dense to read, but a terrifying look inside the illegal mess going on inside the US.
—Vickie2
Well - let's see what kind of version this is :-)
—Min
Very informative, gives unsichtbar in NSA affairs
—PixGeobz
