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Shadow Factory (2008)

by James Bamford(Favorite Author)

3.85 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0385528396 (ISBN13: 9780385528399)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

review 1: The Shadow Factory is a frightening book. It is especially frightening when you realize that the incomprehensibly massive database of phone calls, emails, and web searches that the United States government is indiscriminately intercepting and stockpiling in the name of the War on Terror could easily be used as the foundation of a future tyranny. What is needed right now is a national organization as fanatically devoted to defending the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure as the National Rifle Association is devoted to defending the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.Bamford's book makes the case that in the months before 9/11 there were multiple occasions when the terrorists' activities within the United States could have been detected using not... morehing more than the tools provided by existing laws and the plot could have been foiled if the National Security Agency had been doing its job. After the attacks the NSA shifted from dangerous under reaction to dangerous overreaction and overstepped its Constitutional bounds by essentially intercepting all communication passing through the United States, and all without judicial warrants which would at least give the government's actions the appearance of legality.
review 2: I thought it was prudent to read this well-resarched, detailed NSA revelation/expose in our post-Snowden, post-Patriot Act world. There seems to be a real pattern of war and violence leading to overly invasive wiretapping with at pendulum pushed back and tragedies and malfeasance happening in both cases: American shamed, terorrists undetected, etc. This work lays out the government spying that led to the FISA firewall and how Bush's "warrantless wiretapping" basically took the teeth out of that, all tracking back to Michael Hayden. Lots of the tech is here including the immense power costs required for this type of computing and the geographical solutions to this, the Hawaii station I imagine Snowden was at, and the Israeli locus for spying technological development. less

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