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In The Shadow Factory, James
Bamford, the foremost expert on
the National Security Agency,
charts its transformation since
9-11, as the legendary codebreakers
turned their ears away from outside
enemies, and inward toward enemies
whose communication increasingly
crisscrosses 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 depicts the major American
telecommunications companies
as meekly complying with NSA
demands as they turn over their network
traffic without court orders. He
reveals that the monitoring has been
outsourced to overseas firms with
links to foreign intelligence organizations—
and with the potential to
remotely access U.S. data from outside
the country. And Bamford 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 word is understood.
Fast-paced and riveting, The Shadow Factory is about a
world unseen by any American not holding a high-level
security clearance.
But is also about a world in which even the the softest
whispers are no longer private.
Hardback, 395 pages, #JB
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