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Hey guys, I got his laptop.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's been a little bit of a slow week for interviews, but we're catching up now.
Next up is our good friend Jim Bamford.
He is the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory.
All three about the National Security Agency.
He also wrote a pretext for war.
All about how the neoconservatives lied us into our aggressive invasion of Iraq back in 2002 and 2003.
And a ton of great articles about James Rendon and about the National Security Agency and all over the place.
And a bunch of other great topics.
Very important topics at Rolling Stone, at Wired.com, and jeez, I think the Wall Street Journal and other places.
Anyway, welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Oh, thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, doing good.
Good, good.
Very happy to talk to you again.
I haven't heard from you in a while.
I hope that's because you're in the middle of writing another book.
Oh yeah, a bunch of writing projects I'm working on.
So I'm usually hard to get a hold of what I'm writing.
Hey, no problem.
It never bothers me when you're hard to get a hold of, because that's what I assume is that there's a book worth its weight in platinum on its way.
And by the way, everybody, you've got to read The Shadow Factory.
I mean, this thing, it'll blow your mind and you'll have bad dreams for a week or something.
But still, you've got to read this thing about the National Security Agency.
As far as someone who's never worked for them, you probably are the number one expert on the NSA in our great land here.
And I just would like to hear your reaction to the two big stories.
I'll give credit for both of them to The Guardian, even though the Post is tagging along on the second there.
The National Security Agency has been collecting the metadata of all Americans' phone calls, apparently, not just Verizon, but all Americans' phone calls.
And then also there's this thing, PRISM, about them breaking into all of the biggest Internets or online services that people use, like Skype and Yahoo and et cetera like that.
So I guess, can you tell us what you know and what we need to know here?
Well, you know, the funny thing is that's what a lot of people, including me, have been suggesting for quite a while.
People like Bill Benny, a former NSA senior official, whistleblower and so forth, have been arguing that the NSA is heavily involved in domestic surveillance.
And the NSA kept saying, no, no, it's ridiculous, we would never do anything like that.
And, you know, they would be still saying that unless somebody came up with actual documents.
And that's what makes this so important and interesting is the fact that it's not just a whistleblower out there talking to a reporter.
It's an actual – they're actual documents that are only about a month old, both from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is extremely hard to get any information out of, and from a top-secret code word, no foreign documents from NSA with a lot of slides showing exactly how the NSA eavesdrops on or cooperates basically, gets access to nine internet service companies, Yahoo and Google and Apple and everything else.
And all the time they've been saying that, you know, we don't have any connection to these companies.
Okay, now, so to break this down a little bit, I believe, am I correct, that in both of these cases, they're claiming that the threshold is that the computer has to judge that there's a 51% probability that at least one part of the interaction is overseas or outside U.S. borders somewhere?
Yeah, that's right.
That's their version of probable cause in this case, I guess.
Right, yeah.
Yeah, and, you know, when they're doing these – the other thing is what they use a lot of this information for is data mining.
So once they get a name or once they get a telephone number or once they get an e-mail, you know, even if it's a foreign e-mail, then they start drawing these concentric circles around it and seeing who's contacted that person, who's that person contacted.
And these concentric circles go, you know, two or three deep at least.
They could be the babysitter of a friend of a friend who knows or who has had contact with the target.
And so these may be Americans, a lot of them probably are, and they become under suspicion now simply because they happen to fall into this concentric circle around the target, and they may be two or three removed from them.
So it's very dangerous, and, you know, what's so ironic here is the fact that they keep – the NSA keeps missing these terrorist incidents.
I mean, this has been going on now for, what, six or seven years, and they miss the Boston bombing, they miss the underwear bomber, they miss the Times Square bomber and so forth, even though these people have been communicating over the Internet and telephones.
All the time this program was going on.
Right.
So, you know, what good is this program here?
It's abusing a lot of civil liberties and so forth, but it doesn't seem to be catching any terrorists.
And in addition to that, it's counterproductive because when you're trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want is more data put on it.
So what they're doing is putting these – they're trying to find a needle in a haystack, and they keep putting more hay on the haystack.
It's like every time they have an incident, they call in more people to put more hay on the haystack, making it much more difficult to find the needle.
Instead of, you know, reducing the haystack and spending the money hiring people who are very capable of finding needles.
Yeah.
You talk about in the Shadow Factory about – I think you're using their language.
You're quoting them at the NSA talking about desperately trying to surf on all this information, this ocean of data, rather than drowning in it.
And yet they seem to do nothing but drown in it.
Well, it's because they, when in doubt, ask for more data.
And, you know, the other interesting thing, I was just in London for about 10 days, and they're having a similar debate over there.
They have been having a similar debate while I was over there.
It was about whether the government should be giving permission to require the ISPs, the Internet Service Providers, to keep all their information for a year or more.
And then provide the government access to it.
And this was through a bill through Parliament to suggest this and so forth.
It's basically what NSA has been doing, except they put it all in a storage facility out in Utah.
But the difference is the British are going about this through a democratic process.
There's a bill through Parliament to recommend that they have the Internet Service Providers store this data and provide the government access to it at some point if they need to have access to it.
It was turned down the first time.
It's coming up again, and it's probably going to be turned down again this time.
But the difference is it's out in the open.
They're discussing this, and there's debate.
And that's why it's been turned down.
The public's been against it.
Here it's like East Germany in the Cold War.
They just do it.
It's just secret.
We'll just do this.
We'll get access to all this information.
There's no democratic process involved.
Right.
Yeah, and also this is one of the things that's supposed to be the difference between here and England is we have a Bill of Rights that says what it says forever and for always, and tough if you don't like it, government.
And so the Fourth Amendment is still the Fourth Amendment even if they pass 100 laws.
Well, exactly.
And, you know, what's interesting is how they – I don't think in the history of the United States there's ever been a government official who's come out and said that what we did was against – what the government did was against the law.
They always base whatever their actions are on some law that somebody like John Mew writes in some back room in the Justice Department, and they write an opinion saying this is all legal.
Right.
And that's what they did this time.
They're saying, well, there is this rule that says that we can go in and get business records.
But whoever assumed that that meant that you can get everybody's telephone records in the entire country.
Right.
I mean, so absurd.
So they're saying, well, we'll get it legally because they said we can get business records.
And these are business records.
Well, and, you know, Jim Sensenbrenner, the congressman, is saying, I wrote the Patriot Act and I never said you could do that.
Right.
I love that.
Yeah.
That's really great.
Now, one of the things that's going on here, you referred to there, you know, about the method of what they think they're doing with all this data.
And you talk about this in the book, too, and it's been enough years now.
I don't remember exactly how it goes in the book.
But basically, I think a lot of what we're talking about here, when government says intelligence, what they mean is a government-sponsored conspiracy theory.
And what they're doing with these computers is they're basically just automating conspiracy theory.
And we've seen this kind of thing in practice in Afghanistan.
And Gareth Porter won the what's-her-name prize in England for his great reporting on the Delta Force night raids going around murdering Afghans in the middle of the night based on the fact that your brother's cousin's nephew's cousin's former roommate had a cell phone that once called this guy that once called that guy.
And so you're all in the big Haqqani conspiracy against us.
And when it's all automated, then that makes it even easier to get away with doing wrong on the part of the people who supposedly are responsible because then their attitude is simply, well, the computer says.
The computer's determined there's a 51 percent chance that it's OK to tap Jim Bamford's phone.
The computer says that there's a 35 percent chance that we ought to go ahead and do a drone strike on this guy doing jumping jacks and we'll call him a militant later or whatever it is.
And basically there's no knowledge here, right?
There's no, like, actual people coming up with real answers to real questions.
They're just asking Windows to figure out who's the bad guy.
Right.
It eliminates all this issue of probable cause and warrants and so forth.
And accountability.
Yeah, exactly.
And all that was put in there to prevent exactly this kind of thing.
So the NSA is inundated with computers, and that's how they feel that they're going to find a suspect.
The problem is what they're trying to do is find terrorists by taking the entire population of the United States and looking at it instead of doing it the way everybody else does, and that's you start with a predicate, some action, somebody does something, and then you work back from there.
You find who's connected to that, who's involved with that person, and then you get that person's phone records and you get somebody else's phone records that's associated with that person.
So you work in that direction rather than trying to just take everybody's phone calls and see who's calling whom.
Right.
I mean, that's the way George Orwell might have had it if he was rewriting 1984 into 2013.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, now, okay, so this is going to sound silly, I think, especially from the fact that I've asked you this for years now, and you've always said, no, no, no, not like that.
But there was an FBI agent on TV on CNN a few weeks back, and Greenwald wrote about this, is the reason I know about it.
You may have seen this.
And this FBI agent told the CNN lady, and twice, he came back the next day and repeated it, that the NSA and or the FBI, whoever, I guess, would be able to go back and listen to Tamerlane Tsarnaev, to listen to his phone calls, who he spent, not just find out, look at a piece of paper, a printout of which phone numbers his phone number has been in contact with, but actually listen to his phone conversations to go back in time.
And they clarify, wait a minute, are you saying that they have actual recordings of everybody's phone calls that they can just go back and listen to?
And the agent said yes.
And that didn't seem quite right to me.
In fact, I thought he must mean something like this at the time.
But then again, Jim, I thought, you know what?
Telephone quality is not that high quality.
And if you can zip it down all the way into, you know, some kind of MP3 that makes it really, really small, why not save the audio files of everybody's phone calls?
Is that plausible to you at all, that they're saving the audio of our conversations?
Well, they're saving the external data, and they're probably saving, they save billions of e-mail every year.
That's why they're building the data center in Bluffdale and so forth.
But with the, yeah, it's completely feasible.
And whether they were doing it, the problem with this is getting, always getting proof that they're doing something like that.
I remember reading when that FBI agent said that, and I read it, and I thought, wow.
You know, I didn't know how he would, number one, know that.
Number two, how that would technically be possible that they'd be intercepting, you know, enormous amounts of communications.
But I can imagine, I mean, and then storing it.
But I can imagine them making an argument for that now by saying that, look, if we had, you know, the two brothers in Boston, if we had their communications from three years ago, them talking to Chechnya or other places, then, you know, we would be able to go back and find links and connections.
And I could really picture them making that argument.
And then, you know, without any debate or whatever, then the administration or whatever would come out and say, yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
Well, I'll ask you this.
Why do you think that all this stuff is leaking out now?
As you said, the FISA court, nobody ever leaks anything from the FISA court.
The National Security Agency, a full-scale PowerPoint presentation, not word of one, but here's the PowerPoint about how we're tapping everybody's e-mail and Google searches.
I mean, that's really something else, isn't it?
Well, exactly, yeah.
And you were mentioning the FBI agent before that made those comments.
And it was interesting to me that he made those comments at the same time, well, right around the same time he made those comments.
And then there was, you know, a bit of a flap over that.
I saw there were a number of articles written about that conversation.
And then all of a sudden, you know, these documents turn up with Clint Greenwald.
One possible scenario there was that he had a follower that heard the controversy and then heard all these people denying that the government does these things.
And then he comes forward with the documents or whatever.
Yeah, so let's get this ball rolling.
Yeah, because that was the same thing that happened with the warrantless wiretapping leak.
It was a person in the Justice Department who had access to information where he knew about what was going on, and he blew the whistle on it.
And this person here apparently was, it says the intelligence community, you know, probably NSA, but who knows.
Not that I'm the best at this technical stuff, but one thing I've learned from doing this show is that regular telephone landline quality is only 14K, and cell phone quality is only 8K.
And so compared to, you know, I saved this audio file of my voice and the music that gets played or whatever at 256 so that it sounds good when it gets replayed over the radio later and all that kind of thing.
But 8K, that's pretty poor quality, but it's just fine.
If you want to listen to people's conversation, you could save it down to probably, I don't know, maybe two or three.
And if you can modulate it a certain way to wash out any kind of distortion, high-end distortion that you would get or something, maybe you could save it in really low quality and still it would be good enough for a cop to listen to if he needed to go back and listen to it.
And then maybe from there, I mean, you think how much MP3 is zipping down compared to the size of a WAV file, right?
Well, there must be a hundred different ways to code, a thousand different ways to code audio, and there must be ways to zip it way, way, way down to where really a half-hour conversation between Scott Horton and James Bamford can fit on the point of a pen in terms of storage space.
Well, sure.
I mean, you know, they are intercepting and keeping and storing heavy-duty data from the Internet, from that PRISM program where they're getting pictures and audio and video and so forth from the Internet that they're storing.
So it's not just putting numbers in there.
They're not just putting telephone numbers in there.
They're putting, you know, heavy-duty pictures and video and audio and all that that they get from the Internet.
I mean, it says right on that slide a lot of those things that they're accessing from the, you know, from the Internet service provider, Google and all that.
And it was also interesting looking at one of those slides where it says, now we're going to go after our next target or whatever to try to get cooperation with is Dropbox or whatever, you know, people put a lot of high-megabyte items in and so forth.
So, yeah, I don't – the idea that they're just going after just email or something I think is a mistake.
Damn it, Jim.
I was really hoping that you were going to say, Scott, you're getting ahead of yourself.
No, there's no way in the world that they're saving all our phone calls.
But you know what?
You're right.
I mean, compare that to all the – what they're downloading every day, the audio of Americans' phone calls can only be just a percentage of that, right?
It's not a thousand times what they're already saving probably.
I mean, I'm just making things up, you know, in my imagination.
But it seems like it's probably just a percentage of what they're already getting rather than doubling or tripling it if they were to add all the phone call audio, right?
Well, sure, they may have ways of shrinking a lot of this data down, too, or a lot of ways to compress it.
You know, NSA is at the ultimate edge of the technological realm.
They're working on a computer now, building a computer down in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that will be basically the fastest, most powerful computer on Earth, able to do a – I think it's called a zettaflop worth of calculations, looks like a septillion operations a second or something like that.
It'll take up – it'll be the size of an entire warehouse.
And, again, that was all secret.
I talked about that in my Wired article last year on the data center in Bluffdale.
They're building that thing simultaneously with building Bluffdale.
So, you know, the idea is to have this super-powerful computer to go through all the things they're storing in Bluffdale.
Yeah.
Well, and then I guess this is one of the things that you talk about in your article, too, and this has actually been the subject of whistleblowers and scandals and what have you, and the software used to sift this information.
And I think that was sort of the silver lining on the Drake case, right, was that they're no good at doing anything with this stuff because of corruption in the National Security Agency.
They'd rather make their friends rich than use a program that works well.
That's true, and we found a lot of that when we were working on the Drake case.
And a lot of that stuff just gets buried in the, I mean, never ever see any of that stuff come to the court.
Right.
All right, well, and now when you say a Zetaflop or whatever, I take it that because it starts with a Z, that means it's even more than a Yottaflop or whatever it was, which is where I think we left off talking when your book came out in 2008 or 2009 or whatever it was.
How much data is this?
I think in the book you compare it to, you know, in percentages to all of what's been published in the history of humanity.
Yeah, I couldn't remember some of the comparisons, but it was, yeah, there's different designations like in the storage of data in Utah, the term was a Yottabyte of data, which is the highest number there is, and it was equivalent to 500 quintillion pages of text.
So a Yottabyte is a measurement of volume size, and then a Zetaflop is a measurement of speed.
I never did that good in math.
Bytes and flops, got it.
It boggles my mind.
Yeah, and it's hard for me to keep straight.
It's pretty far outside my area of expertise there, but got it.
So flops is speed and, yeah, bytes is size.
I knew that much.
But, yeah, wow.
So it is, you quote, I think this is not to ruin it for everybody.
I still want you to go out and buy it, but you end the book, The Shadow Factory quoting Frank Church as saying that we already have, and this is in the 1970s when I was a little baby crawling around on the floor.
Frank Church, the senator, said, this is a turnkey totalitarian state.
If you took the military surveillance capability that the U.S. government has and turned it toward the American people, they would be slaves.
That would be endgame for freedom in America.
That's it.
Well, he said that at a time when there was no Internet, no cell phones, no Google searches, no Bluffdale storage facility for NSA.
So, you know, he said this at a time way before the NSA has the capability to do what it can do today.
I actually have to jump off here just a minute or so, unfortunately.
That's fine.
I actually was about to cut you off here too.
I've got to go.
But I want to really thank you very much for your time.
And then I can take the rest of this time.
I can run out the hour telling everybody about your books.
So thanks very much.
I appreciate it.
Well, thanks, Scott.
Always good being on the show.
Yeah, it's definitely good talking to you.
Thank you.
All right.
That is the great James Bamford, and he's the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory about the National Security Agency.
And then he also wrote A Pretext for War, which is just an excellent telling of how the neoconservative movement basically, you know, did a regime change in D.C. and took the country to war in Iraq and ruined everything for everyone for generations.
Okay, good.
So that is the great James Bamford.
Also, read him.
He had a thing about the giant new storage facility in Utah in Wired that ran, I think, last December.
And I interviewed him about that.
You can search his name at my site, scottwharton.org, and listen to my interviews of him going back through the years.
But you've got to read The Shadow Factory, man.
It will absolutely blow your mind what these guys are up to.
And you can get it on audiobook and whatever.
In fact, I've read it, and then I listened to it on audiobook.
Good stuff, man.
The great James Bamford.
Oh, and also read his great article in Rolling Stone, The Man Who Sold the War, about John Rendon.
That's a good one.
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Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
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