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Blurb: “Today's 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.“