Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 38
 Watching Every Move You Make November 10, 2009
southpaw68 (florida)
Bamford's Shadow Factory has some good narratives and some tedious details about how the NSA works, which could have been summarized more. I liked the story about how the terrorists planned 911 in the US and in NSA's hometown of Laurel, Maryland. --Embarrassing stuff. If the NSA had not been overly cautious about violating civil liberties before 911, the terrorists could have been caught without breaking laws protecting civil liberties. But the director of the NSA was afraid that the NSA would be prosecuted for civil rights violations, so the NSA played it safe until 9-11. As usual, the FBI, CIA, and NSA before 9-11 had trouble communicating and cooperating with one another due to rivalries, jealousies, and clashing ambitions over power and jurisdiction, which lead to security breaches.
Bamford covers the violations against civil liberties after 9-11 in attempts to capture terrorists. Bush, Cheney, and Gonzalez supported warrantless wiretapping of the American public, which is illegal. Attorney General Ashcroft and other high level bureaucrats eventually refused to keep renewing the program every forty five days because of its illegality. After many threatened to resign if warrantless wiretapping were to continue, the president backed down over Cheney's objections. Another violation of privacy has been that phone and internet companies willingly let the NSA spy on their lines on everyone. This illegal cooperation with spying has a long history.
Bamford covers the data mining companies. Private data mining companies will sell their services to any government no matter how oppressive. A lot of data mining companies are from Israel and are closely tied to Israeli intelligence. As I understand it, these Israeli companies are still doing data mining for the United States and have all our communication systems bugged. One Israeli company called Comverse had a president that was accused of criminal charges that he would have to do several years time for. He fled from New York to Israel to Namibia trying to escape the jail time, but was eventually caught.
Bamford covers NSA's problems, practices and foes. One of NSA's problems is that they gather so much data; they have trouble filtering through all of it. But their watch list keeps growing to hundreds of thousands of people as they put people on the list who have any contact with their prime suspects. People do not know that they are on the list. The NSA sends letters to communications companies demanding information on a targeted client and the company cannot reject the request or say anything about it. Congress has tried to rein in some of NSA's violations of privacy with only partial success.
The book brings up questions about how much freedom and privacy a society should have as opposed to being secure. Do you want security or privacy? Or do you want a free and open society that is somewhat dangerous, or a safe society that is totally oppressive? Should we restrict certain people from being in our society if they come from a hostile culture? Will we be able to control technology for good use or will it totally enslave us? What good is security, if it takes all your freedoms away?
Outstanding book examining the excesses of the Bush (Pres. #43) Regime after 9-11 October 26, 2009
Ricahrd A. Salzer (Chesapeake, Virginia, USA)
Author James Bamford does yeoman work
here showing the paranoia and dictat-
orial excesses of the 'Pres. Dubya'
criminal regime without all the Mike
Moore cloak-and-dagger/leftist Propa-
ganda, not that Fahrenheit 9-11 was
all bad [see my review on that and
all my reviews here on amazon dot com].
The National Security Administration
missed tracking two of the (alledged)
9-11 hijackers and this led to the
'make up' call of the surveillance
of many average Amer-I-cans and data
being collected on all of us behind
our backs for 'National Security', blah-
blah. I highly recommend everybody get-
ting this book, Bamford's best to date! -
Revisionist Rich Salzer,
Moyock, North Carolina, USA
 Very interesting October 23, 2009
DAJ
An excellent discussion of the disconnect between the different US intelligence agencies in the run up to 9/11, and scary information about the erosion of US civil liberties and the types of programs that the NSA are engaged in. Very interesting.
The Shadow Factory October 1, 2009
S. W. Billingsley (Brookeville, Maryland U.S.A.)
James Bamford packs an incredible amount of information, not before seen, in this book.
Some of it is very disturbing, regarding NSA's (past ?) monitoring of American citizens
Bamford does it again August 23, 2009
Lance B. Hillsinger (San Luis Obispo)
The Shadow Factory is James Bamford's third book on intelligence gathering. The first two Body of Secrets and Puzzle Palace were great reads and have earned, with The Shadow Factory, a permanent place on my bookshelf.
The Shadow Factory provides more details than its predcessors. These details provide the reader with impressive, even dramatic information. However, the wealth of detail, particulary in the beginning slows the narrative. Also, at times, Bamford, like the NSA, has gathered too much information for his own good. For instance, he provides the exact street addresses for key telecommunications sites in the United States. These telecommunications sites could be inviting targets for terrorists. For the sake of National Security he should have used more discretion.
While acknowledging the importance of intelligence gathering to National Security, Bamford reminds us of the importance of maintaing our civil liberities. Whether you agree or not with his analysis, the objective information he provides makes The Shadow Factory a must read for any serious discourse on the issue.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 38
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