09/18/14 – James Bamford – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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Our next guest on the show today is our friend James Bamford, and he wrote the books on the NSA, The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, A Pretext for War, and The Shadow Factory.
And A Pretext for War talks about other things besides the NSA, but there's some NSA stuff in there too.
And also, it's a really great book about all kinds of stuff and how the neocons light us into war and everything.
It's awesome.
And did I mention The Shadow Factory?
And he's got this one here at the New York Times, Israel's NSA Scandal.
And just a couple of months back, he had Edward Snowden, The Untold Story, an in-depth interview and study of Snowden and his situation and his revelations for Wired Magazine, which is all available at wired.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you doing?
Yeah, great Scott.
Thanks.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And I'm reminded, if I ever knew, I must have forgotten that you actually started off on this course.
I must have read this in one of your books at some point, that you actually started off on this course because you were a whistleblower yourself in the U.S. Navy.
Can you tell us about that real quick?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I wrote a little bit about that in my Wired article about when I met with Snowden.
What happened was I was in the Navy for three years during the Vietnam War, and I was assigned to a unit in Hawaii that was the Navy's equivalent of the NSA, the Navy's NSA branch, basically.
So like Snowden, I was in the NSA in Hawaii, and most of what I learned there had to do with the Vietnam War and so forth.
But then when I came back and I was in law school, I was in the Reserves, Navy Reserves, and then I was sent on a two-week active duty to a listening post in Puerto Rico.
And while in the listening post, one of the people there asked if I wanted to listen to one of the conversations they were hearing on the earphones, since I was just sort of wandering around as a two-week active duty there.
And so I said, sure, but I didn't speak Spanish, which is mostly what they were targeting down there.
But he said, don't worry, you know, I was speaking English.
So I listened to it, and they were American-speaking.
I didn't really think much of it when I was down there.
And then when I got back to law school, I started thinking about, don't you need a warrant for something like that?
And I was a student prosecutor my last year in law school.
So we talked about getting warrants and so forth and probable cause and all that.
So I thought it was very odd that they didn't have any kind of legal justification for eavesdropping on Americans.
And around that time, the church committee was starting.
So I let the church committee, I gave them a call and just happened to tell them that what I was doing, what I heard down there.
They were very surprised, and they sent an investigator down and discovered what I was saying was true.
And I ended up spending a number of days down in Washington testifying before the committee and executive session.
Wow, that's really something else.
A big part of history there, a small footnote in a big part of history, Jim.
Well, that was one of the things that inspired me to write the first book about NSA, The Puzzle Palace.
I thought, hey, we're getting away with this.
Who knows what else we're getting away with?
And nobody's ever heard of this agency, and somebody should look into it.
So that's why I decided, after I graduated from law school, to become a writer and start off with The Puzzle Palace.
And then I usually, I guess lately, I've been leaving this out of your bio because it's been a while, but you were a producer for ABC World News Tonight for a long time and got into journalism besides just the NSA books, too.
You did a lot of other work.
I should mention that from time to time.
And you've written a lot of great articles for Rolling Stone, like The Man Who Sold the War, and a lot of other things for Wired and other things.
I like to mention all that stuff.
It's good work.
Yeah, thanks.
Please talk to us about Unit 8200 and these new refuseniks.
Well, Unit 8200 is something I haven't known about for a long time because it's the Israeli equivalent of NSA.
It's been very secret.
Very few people ever hear about it.
It doesn't really get any attention.
And just to back up a bit, I was in Moscow last summer and Ed Snowden, when I was interviewing him, I spent three days with him in Moscow.
Among the things he told me was that the NSA was passing to Unit 8200 unredacted intercepts that it was picking up in the U.S. and around the world.
And so that was very shocking because even England, even friendly countries that are part of the Five Eyes Agreement, don't get unredacted or intercepts where the names and personal information is deleted.
So they were giving that to Israel, which was quite shocking.
And then just last week, it turned out that 43 veterans of Unit 8200, some of them still serving in the reserves, decided to basically walk out or quit.
They said they weren't going to do this type of activity anymore because it was a violation of, basically, of the rights of the Palestinians.
Using intercepts that talked about sexual activity, things like that, and then using that as blackmail against the Palestinians, such as their sexual preferences.
They happen to be gay.
And then use that to blackmail them into becoming workers for Israel, informants for Israel, which they thought was very disgusting.
And they decided to quit.
I've never seen an intelligence agency anywhere at any time where you have 43 people all of a sudden agree to basically stop and blow the whistle.
Yeah, that's amazing.
43 whistleblowers from Unit 8200, and they, like Snowden, they didn't hide their names.
They all signed a letter to the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
So it was quite extraordinary.
And when you put those two facts together, the fact that the NSA is sending unredacted information from the United States, and that may include a lot of information from Palestinian Americans communicating to their relatives in Palestine or in Israel, and then having it all secretly turned over, names and data and everything else, to the Israelis who then use it to blackmail and intimidate and coerce innocent Palestinians, then it's certainly a scandal.
Now, do you know if any of the refuseniks have actually mentioned the NSA at all in doing this work, or just it's as simple as that?
They're using everything that they've got, including, of course, what the NSA is turning over to them, that, as you said, would include even people in the United States, maybe.
Right, they didn't specifically mention NSA, but they didn't eliminate anything.
They just said, what they said was that there were virtually no controls on any of the information that they took in.
There was no oversight, no controls.
And the U.S., back in 2009, March of 2009, had an agreement with Israel where they would give them all this unredacted information, and the U.S. put a caveat in there saying that the Israelis should abide by U.S. laws and so forth, but there was nothing in there to enforce it.
It specifically said this was a non-binding agreement, and as the veterans of Unit 8200 indicated, there was no supervision of any of that, so there was no internal restriction saying, no, this is American, don't use it.
There weren't any restrictions whatsoever.
And then, I'm trying to find, oh, here it is, right here in your New York Times article, Jim, you use the phrase virtually all forms of communication.
Am I understanding you right?
You're saying the NSA, and you're referring back to this Guardian story and the Snowden documents, that you're telling me they're giving the entire haul of their daily vacuuming up of every one and zero in the world, they're turning it over to the Israelis on a daily basis, and then, separately, secondarily, it's on the Israelis to not look at what the congressmen are saying to their mistresses, or the judges are saying to the defense contractors that pay them off, or any of these kind of things?
They're on their honor to...
Or the Palestinian Americans are saying to their elders back in Palestine or Israel.
So, no, there are no restrictions.
That's what the veterans, the whistleblower said, plus the U.S. document itself said it will cover virtually all forms of communication, including, but not limited to, un-evaluated and un-minimized transcripts, gist, facsimiles, telex, voice, and digital network intelligence, metadata, and content.
Big words for email.
So, yeah, virtually everything.
A fax, a telex, a telephone call, and it's talking about content and transcripts and so forth.
And then it said the agency routinely sends this information, this un-minimized data, to Israel.
So, no, it's quite extraordinary, because, you know, this is a foreign country, and these are private communications by innocent Americans.
Whoever, you know...
You know, I'm more guilty.
Whoever gave me authorization.
I'm more concerned about the guilty ones, Jim.
Like you're saying about these poor Palestinians, people with power in America being compromised, you know, it's not just Tom, Dick, and Harry and your local Palestinian neighbors who are having their information turned over, but this wouldn't exclude Congress, it wouldn't exclude high-level officials of the executive branch, it wouldn't exclude federal judges, would it?
This would include everything on them, too.
There was absolutely nothing in there saying any kind of exclusion.
It was everything.
I mean, there was no...
The words were, all forms of communication were evaluated, un-minimized, the transcripts and so forth.
So, no, there wasn't any restrictions on what kind of information would be sent.
So, yeah, it could be anything, and that's very dangerous when you allow a foreign country complete access to private U.S. communication.
I think this article, this op-ed piece of yours in the New York Times may have been the New York Times' first mention of this story.
They certainly did not cover it when it originally came out, as they usually do with new Snowden stories that appear in other places.
You know, they'll have a New York Times write-up that says the Washington Post said today, kind of thing.
But they sure didn't mention this one until now, it looks like.
So, or I don't think they did, anyway.
I know they didn't at the very beginning.
So, that's kind of part of our problem, is that, you know, you've been reporting about the NSA and different aspects of their relationship with the Israeli government, pretty scandalous terms, I think, for, what, seven years now?
And that never made the New York Times, either.
So now here we are, seven years later, and we see that the same kinds of things are still going on.
Well, yeah, and when the New York Times decided not to do that, do a story based on that one, when some of these details came out originally in The Guardian, not the whistleblower aspects of it, but the fact that the NSA was sharing the information with Israel.
Later on, a couple days later, I think it was, the ombudsman for the New York Times said that was a mistake, they shouldn't have done that.
And that was one of the reasons I wanted to write this, was because it had been overlooked a great deal in the United States, and so I thought that this was a perfect opportunity to re-alert people to the fact that this was going on, and the peg, you know, the really interesting peg is the fact that you have 43 people from the Israeli NSA complaining about the immoral and improper use of this information.
All right, and now, can you remind us again about, is it NARAS and Verint and these Israeli companies and their software, and what was the controversy back when your book came out, The Shadow Factory, in 2007?
Yeah, well, what I thought was really fascinating when I was writing my last book on NSA, The Shadow Factory, was when I was looking into these companies that were given access to all this intelligence, or all this private communications in the U.S., a company such as NARAS, for example, was actually formed by Israelis, and largely formed in Israel, although they had an office in California, and what NARAS did was sell to NSA all the equipment for deep packet inspection, in other words, the hardware and software that was used in the secret rooms, such as in San Francisco, to sift through all the incoming traffic, and then look for whatever NSA puts on its watch list, names of people, email addresses, anything that they're looking for.
So, that's why I made a point of discussing it in my book, was because here you have a company that was largely formed by intelligence people from another country that was putting this equipment in a room that was analyzing and intercepting the communications of private Americans, and another company called Verint was very similar, and they were being used by, I think it was by Verizon, where NARAS was being used by AT&T, Verint was being used by Verizon, and at one point in Australia, who had also bought some of this Verint equipment and software, the Australian government discovered that some of that information was being sent out from its repositories in Australia to a foreign country, which I assume would be Israel, and they threatened to cancel the suit that came from a confidential document I got from the Australian government, and so it shows that not only are these companies allowed to get access to all this data, there's been instances where they've exfiltrated this data to someplace else, another foreign country.
And you know, it's funny now, with these Snowden documents, I guess we could see how the argument took place in the office that, well, so what, we already have a memorandum of understanding with the Israelis that they can have everything anyway, so if they got the best software for getting everything, we might as well let them, who cares if they have a back door, we're letting them in the front door, it's wide open.
Yeah, exactly, so who knows what the discussions were, but certainly it didn't sound like there was anybody that was raising any major objections with NSA, because they gave them full access, and that's more access that they even give to their Five Eyes partner.
Oh, and you know what I've been meaning to ask you, Jim, is discrepancy in my understanding about just how much audio they are getting, do they have their computers, you know, quote unquote, listening to for keywords, how much of it are they saving, I don't remember all my footnotes anymore, I used to be really good at this, but somewhere it stuck in my head that they intercept 80 something percent of all landline calls, and 100 percent of all mobile calls, and they're working on making it more, and I thought maybe I had learned that from you, either from your book, or from your interview with William Binney, or I'm not sure, but then it seems like that is decidedly not part of the Snowden revelations, that they're actually listening to all of us, they say no, no, no, it's just the metadata, quote unquote, just, and we all know metadata counts for a lot, but the point being, you know, are they listening to us, or are they not listening to us, Jim?
Well, my understanding is that, first of all, they, with regard to metadata, they, ever since 9-11, they've been collecting all the metadata, that means all the metadata for telephone calls, for example, so anytime somebody calls somebody, anytime you receive a call, or make a call, there's a record of that, anytime, you know, anybody old enough to pick up a telephone is making a call in the last seven years, or the last decade or so, and then NSA has a record of that, they keep records of that, and that's what some of the controversy is over now, is whether to stop that, and up until just a few years ago, they used to do the same thing for all the metadata regarding email, so email, anytime anybody sent or received an email, there'd be a record of that, and as far as I know, none of that has ever been destroyed or anything, so there's probably a decade's worth of everybody's email being held by NSA.
In terms of content, that's different.
There's just not enough people to listen to all the conversations, so as far as I know, they don't.
What they're doing now, though, with this new facility at Bluffdale, is part of what Bluffdale will be, this is the big NSA, million square foot, $2 billion, sort of external hard drive, big storage center for NSA in Utah.
Part of that will be used as what they sort of call a buffer memory, in other words, information will be put in there, including information to and from Americans, and then that information will remain in there for about a month or so until more information comes in and, you know, fills it up and pushes the other information out, so it'll be kept in there, and then if they want to look through that, they have whatever that time period would be, say a month or whatever, so look through all the content if they want.
You're talking audio files, in other words.
Audio recordings.
As far as I know, audio and email.
Audio is much more difficult because it eats up much more bandwidth and all that stuff, but as far as I know, it's kind of like everything.
Well, at least I know it's the email.
I'm not sure of the voice content, but it's certainly the metadata.
And then whoever is actually targeted, however, in that NARS equipment or anywhere else that NSA is targeting, the incoming communications or outgoing communication, then that voice data would definitely be captured because people were on that list, and last time I heard that watch list was like a million names or whatever, so it's somewhat complex in terms of what's kept and what's listened to and all that.
And then the other part of Buffdale will store things forever, for example.
So there's a variety of ways they have of capturing, eavesdropping, and storing information.
But now on the question of the computers, and I'm sorry because I used the term listening way too loosely there.
What I meant was the computers filtering for keywords, like what movie, The Bourne Identity or whatever, where the reporter says the code word Blackbriar on the phone, and the computer is listening for the keywords, and if the computer notices the keyword, then it calls the attention to Jones to come over and look at this.
Or just automatically store it, right.
I'm sorry, and so, but then on the 8020, on that question, I think the 8020 was on how much audio they're actually filtering for keywords.
It was 80% of landlines and 100% of mobile traffic.
Am I just blowing smoke with that?
Do you not remember that or where that came from?
Do you know?
I'm not sure.
In terms of filtering, it's virtually everything coming in or going out of the country because that's where they have the filtering equipment.
So the audio is being scanned, virtually all the audio is being scanned for flagging later if necessary kind of thing.
Well, audio is different.
I don't think they have the capability to filter all the content of audio as it's going through.
They don't have that voice recognition capability that could do everything coming in.
What they do is they look for the metadata, the telephone metadata, and they pick that up, and then they keep it.
The problem with telephone voice communications is that you've got the problem with accents and all that.
It's much easier with digital communications because although you may say house and have an accent or use a foreign language or whatever and it's difficult for the computer to pick up and understand, it's not a problem for a piece of written communication because you're going to spell house just the same way everybody else spells house.
So if you have a computer that can scan, do DPAC and inspection, it's mostly on the digital data, email, and that kind of thing.
I'm always on the outside looking in.
Again, I'm giving this based on what I've been able to put together, but it is extremely complex in terms of what they're doing, and it changes constantly.
You just never know.
But that's the problem.
The problem is that there's very little regulation of NSA, and what regulation there is is classified.
Nobody knows what it is that they do do.
Right.
All right.
Well, with that, I better let you go.
I've kept you over time, but thank you so much for your time.
It's great talking to you again, Jim.
Great.
Thanks for having me on your show.
It's a great show.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
All right, so that is James Bamford.
He wrote The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, A Pretext for War, and The Shadow Factory about the NSA.
He's got a new, in-depth, gigantic, I don't know, 10,000-word essay about his time in Russia with Edward Snowden, and he's got a brand-new article in The New York Times.
It's called Israel's NSA Scandal, and it's about these refuseniks, and then taking the opportunity to bring up again this article that ran in The Guardian back last September 11th, in fact, NSA Shares Raw Intelligence, Including Americans' Data with Israel.
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