My rating: 3 of 5 stars

James Bamford writes a good book on the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 era. This is a good follow up to his groundbreaking work, The Puzzle Palace (1982). It’s a quick read as long as you’ve been following real news over the last ten years (i.e. not watching Faux News) and are either familiar with or don’t care about some of the multitude of details about communication systems that Bamford describes. At times it feels like he weaves his story throughout a large encyclopedia on the intelligence community. The core of the book is very short but having it all in one place makes this a useful reference.

I wish Bamford had explored more deeply a few of the outcomes of the NSA’s programs post-9/11. For example, he doesn’t delve into the correlation between the Republican Congress’s push to outsource NSA’s work to private industry and their ideological axiom that “Gubment bad, m’okay.” Further, he could have explored the election outcome possibilities of the New York Times holding off on their story in 2004 about NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Had they not held off until the following year, their story would likely have been a huge splash heading into the Fall and could have prevented Bush from getting a second term.

The book could have done with a little more editing. Bamford would mention one thing and then repeat it almost verbatim within the next paragraph or two. There were also some stories he gave that weren’t related to his central thesis and could have been expunged without losing his focus nor the strength of his argument.

For me, there are a few important things to take away from this book. First, laws and safeguards are only good if they are enforceable and there is accountability. Laws against spying and communications snooping have been on the books, in some format or another, since the beginning of radio and radio interception. Every time, these laws are broken and those who break them are caught. The public gasps and is horrified that it happened, introduces new laws or penalties and then blindly believes all is well … until the next instance. NSA Director Hayden, Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft at the beginning, Gonzales, Yoo, Addington, etc. all knew the law, all circumvented the law and all got off scot free due to back room deals, fear mongering and the need to “keep things secret.”

Second, Bamford cites various people who felt their conscience wouldn’t allow them to continue doing their jobs due to their actions being illegal and/or unethical. Some leave, some leave after a long period, and some just sit back and brood internally while helping the cogs of the system grind along. Others are browbeaten by colleagues and superiors to “just do it” or fear mongered into committing acts that go against their values, and sometimes against the laws and the Constitution. We need to encourage people to stand up for their beliefs and our laws.

Third, President Eisenhower’s retirement warning to beware the military industrial complex is still true today, especially with regard to the bed occupied by the NSA and their contractors. Senior executives at NSA, including former directors, leave government service and sit on the boards or become executives at private companies. These companies then get very profitable contracts. It seems there should be some effort made to prevent the appearance, or actuality, of collusion and bringing in the bucks because of who you know. And like with other public/private partnerships, it’s sad to see all the public funds being used to create technology that is then resold to others with the profits going to the companies, not the government or taxpayers.

A seemingly endless bucket of money is poured into a black hole without questioning what is being done with the money and if we are getting our money’s worth. In a post-9/11 world, greed is good and profitable for security contractors. Worse, some of these contractors sell their goods and services to other countries, friend and foe, to help monitor and in some cases, control and suppress their own populace. Bamford writes that “for the companies, marketing mass interception systems to dictatorships and authoritarian governments to enhance their police states and to jail opponents is just business” (p. 261). He quotes Steve Bannerman, a VP of marketing at Naros (one of these companies): “Once our customers buy our products, it’s relatively opaque to us” (p. 261). Looking the other way, especially in these types of instances, is simply unacceptable. Today’s Stasi are wearing red, white and blue and munching on Mom’s apple pie.

Finally, I’d like to ask who will be our age’s Senator Frank Church? I hope she or he comes to the fore soon. Bamford connects the dots and shows us where some of the graves are. In some of those graves are our privacy and transparency in what occurs behind NSA’s doors. Spy agencies and their contractors get total privacy while the general population, who are supposed to be receiving the protection of these groups, are left with nothing but their lives recorded in databases and analyzed by supercomputers.