07/29/13 – James Bamford – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Worden.
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And I forget the context now, but I discovered the other day that the first time I interviewed James Bamford was back in 2000.
And, well, now I forget.
Was it 4 or 5?
But anyway, a long time ago, almost a decade, we've been talking with Jim Bamford on the show about the National Security Agency.
Ooh, and also his great book, A Pretext for War, which has a little NSA stuff in it.
But anyway, and all his great journalism for Rolling Stone and all the different places where he publishes articles.
But most importantly, he is America's great chronicler of the National Security Agency.
The books are The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, as I mentioned, A Pretext for War, which is sort of a side issue, and then The Shadow Factory.
And that is the National Security Agency from September 11th through the spying scandal or whatever.
I forget the exact subtitle.
But anyway, you can find all those at Amazon.com, and you ought to read them.
Now, at question today is they know much more than you think at the New York Review of Books, nybooks.com.
And from last month, The Secret War at wired.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Oh, good, Scott.
Great to be here.
Well, I'm very happy to have you back on the show.
I always learn a lot every time I read you.
I'm very interested to know what you have learned.
After writing uncounted thousands of pages, I guess, about the National Security Agency, what have you learned from the Snowden revelations that you think are the most important for the American people to understand?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
A number of the revelations have come out before from other whistleblowers, Bill Binney and other people.
But what really has an impact is when the information can't be lied about or can't be, you know, somebody can't come out with a press release and say that that's not true.
So this is the first time that I think I've ever seen where somebody has actually come out with the actual goods, the documents, the evidence that shows that this isn't all just people talking through their hats, that this is massive surveillance by the U.S. government, by NSA.
And so that's what surprised me most was the fact that somebody was actually able to get all the documents out and, you know, this massive amount of documents, which I think only a fraction have been released so far, to get them out and to get them in the public domain.
All right.
Now, it's been a few years now.
It was what, 2008, 2009 is when the Shadow Factory came out.
And I read the whole thing and I listened to the audio book, too.
But it's still been a few years.
But I think mostly what I learned from that, the most important thing I learned from that, is they're vacuuming up everything that's transferring between here and there.
So I guess that doesn't mean they have full access to everybody's database.
But anything that gets sent anywhere, they're vacuuming up, basically.
Or maybe they're missing some of it, but some massive percentage of it.
And then I guess this PRISM program, that's how they get access to the rest, or as much of the rest as they can.
Is that about right?
Well, it's through cable interception, interception of the cable traffic.
That's the way most communications are communicated these days, through fiber optic cables.
And according to the documents that were released, and what I write about in the New York Review of Books article, particularly, is this enormous focus on the fiber optic cables.
Because if you can get access to the cables, then you've pretty much got access to most everything.
And what it shows, what the documents basically show, is that they get about 80% of what they need from direct interception from the cables themselves.
And then what they miss, they go to the Internet companies, to Google or Yahoo or the nine companies that they mention, and get what they miss.
Also in the article, I mentioned that there were some obscure aspects of the documents that were released by Snowden that really haven't been picked up on very much.
Particularly this one document that was the Inspector General's report of the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping.
And it said currently that the NSA has cooperation from over 100 U.S. companies in terms of supplying communications information.
So this is much wider, I think, much more widely spread than most people realize, that there's so much more cooperation and that there's so much more access to communications.
What they do with it is hard to say.
They data mine a lot of the information.
They store a lot of it.
And those are the kind of things that really need to be explored further now that these initial information out there is how much, how long, and what is it that they're taking.
I think it's really important the way that you construct the article around the subject of George Orwell in 1984 and his vision of a dystopian, sort of perfect totalitarianism that's got you checkmated no matter which way you go.
And such a big part of that story is the total surveillance.
And it's interesting, as you note in your article, that America's actually not a totalitarian society.
At least there's still a lot of freedom of speech.
Of course, there are two million people in prison.
It's pretty totalitarian to them.
But in many ways, it's sort of like they've created this massive shoe waiting above us to drop, but it never does seem to drop in a way, right?
Like you quote a church talking about this is the turnkey totalitarian state, but they never quite turn the key, but they just keep building it up where it's the kind of thing that George Orwell could have never imagined in a million years, or the capability of it.
Right.
In the 1940s, when he wrote 1984, obviously he could never have imagined anything like this.
His view of surveillance were these giant screens that could...
There were two-way screens that if you were in front of a screen, it could see you, and you could see what's on television, and the television could see you and hear you.
But the whole idea of communicating...
You know, right now the problem is that you're not just communicating one-on-one with another person, but you're communicating to a large degree in your own head, and that's what happens when you're doing a Google search.
You're not transferring any information to another human being.
You're just...
It's a train of thought as you're looking at Google, and by accessing all that information, by accessing all your Google information, for example, an agency would be able to get what's going on in your mind as you're thinking, because a lot of times what you're thinking is in the tips of your fingers as you're hitting those keys.
And, you know, that's where you start getting into the very scary part of surveillance when you get access to not only what people are saying but what people are thinking.
And I think that's where, you know, people should start getting worried and concerned because as far as, you know, as far as what we've been able to see, there are very few breaks, if any breaks, on the NSA.
Certainly not the Congress or the FISA Court.
Well, and it's so easy to imagine, too, how the common refrain about, well, if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about, doesn't really count in that case because anyone can see how a cop on the other end or NSA, whoever, on the other end could misunderstand their Google searches and what they must have been thinking when they Googled this, that, or the other thing.
And, you know, it's funny, isn't it?
Trying to, you know, live in your life like you've got to keep track of your alibi at all times in case you and Matlock need to get yourself out of trouble for being false EQs or something.
You know what I mean?
All the time.
Jeez, I want to search for formaldehyde, but what if later they try to say, aha, he searched for formaldehyde, but who knows what that meant when I did it or whatever, you know?
Well, it's the same thing with the phone records that they're keeping.
You know, they keep everybody's phone record on a real-time basis.
This phone call we're making here is going to be held at NSA, or the fact that our two phones are communicating with each other are going to be held at NSA for the next five years or as long as they want it.
And, again, you get into all these major problems.
Suppose I have a son, and he's doing a project on North Korea, and he calls the North Korean embassy.
Well, you're definitely going to be on the watch list if you're calling the North Korean embassy or the North Korean mission, I guess, up in New York.
So there's many ways you can become a target without ever, you know, having any thought that you're going to be a target.
And if you've got all this information, if you've got all this information about who's communicating with whom and how long and where they're calling from and all that data, who's to say it's not going to be misused?
All right, Jim, I'm sorry.
I've got to interrupt you because your phone's going to pot on me here.
Could you maybe hold it different or stand near the window or something?
It's a bit of a problem.
And then while you're doing that, I'll just mention that.
Just think about, everyone, who all is in Jim Bamford's cell phone, right?
Who his sources must be, people who are under investigation by the government probably for talking to Jim Bamford.
But then he's in my cell phone.
But then, so all the people that are in my cell phone who are just regular people who have been my friends since I was a little kid or whatever and aren't even political people at all, they're on the list now of people who are linked to Bamford's sources.
And then they're friends too, right?
I mean, that's the kind of three hops madness we're talking about here.
Data, a bunch of ones and zeros in the place of any knowledge about who's who or what anything really means.
Well, that's one of the other revelations that have come out.
Actually, it was the, I think it was the lawyer for NSA that actually said it, that they can go out to three hops.
Well, one hop is everybody you know, everybody you've ever communicated with, which may be, say, 100 people, 120 people or whatever.
And then the hop two is everybody that those 120 people who have ever communicated with.
So if you multiply 100 times 100, and then the third hop would be all of those people.
So you're talking thousands and thousands of people just on one search, one data mining search.
And that's what people, I think, need to understand.
So when they say, we've only gone in there to look 300 times or something.
Well, each of those 300 times, you may be getting 10,000 names or more.
So these numbers have to be placed in context.
Now, you know, you're right about the inspector general report not getting that much press.
I didn't even know that.
That's published at the Guardian.
I learned that this morning reading your article, rereading it.
I missed it the first time.
There's an IG report that Snowden leaked the whole thing.
And this is about the IG's report on what Bush was doing back when, before Congress and the Democrats legalized it.
Well, it actually brings it up pretty much up to date, up to 2011 or 2012.
Oh, great.
Man, I need to read that.
It's actually, yeah, most people missed it because both the Guardian and the Washington Post put it as a link where you could read the entire document.
They only quoted a few paragraphs from it, but it's a 55-page document.
And it goes to basically the Rosetta Stone for NSA's eavesdropping.
What it was was when the Congress created the FISA Amendments Act in 2008, part of that act was to require the NSA inspector general to review the entire warrantless wiretapping program and to write a report on it.
And that report was written, and it was an extremely highly classified top secret with about three or four different code words after it and so forth.
And so nobody ever got to see it.
And then that was released, and it shows it's very detailed in terms of how much communications was intercepted, how much who would.
You know, one of the things they did do was they hid the cooperation from the different telecom companies.
In other words, AT&T, Verizon, and so forth.
They didn't put their names in there, but if you read it closely, you can see where they actually said in the report, Company A has like 42% of the customers in the U.S., and Company B has 38%.
And if you just figure that out, then you know that Company A is AT&T and Company B is Verizon.
Company C is Sprint, I think it is.
So you can actually see how much cooperation was given by each of these companies.
I wrote that in my New York Review of Books article because I went over that document pretty closely and really found a lot of things that had never come out before.
Yeah.
Again, that one is They Know Much More Than You Think by James Bamford at the New York Review of Books, nybooks.com.
And I think that one is on antiwar.com today.
Or no, I guess it was over the weekend.
Anyway, there it is at the New York Review of Books.
They Know Much More Than You Think.
And then, let's see, before I ask all about General Alexander and the cyber war and all that, that great piece that you wrote for Wired, can we review about Narus, which is, that's the software that was developed by an Israeli company to do the sifting, to be the smarts that figure out what data they need to pay attention to and what they don't.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Narus was a company formed a number of years ago by Israelis in Israel.
And then they came to the United States and established their office in California.
And then NSA became their big customer.
And basically what they did was they supplied NSA with the equipment and the software for their secret rooms, such as the secret room in San Francisco, where all the communications coming in and going out.
This is the main switch for AT&T in San Francisco.
For most of the communications for the northwestern part of the United States, transit goes in and out.
And NSA established a secret room in the switch.
And in that room they put all this Narus equipment.
And what the Narus equipment does is, as all this email, for example, is going by at the speed of light, it has the capability of looking at not just the metadata, but it can analyze the content of emails and other data as it's going by.
So if you program the Narus software or equipment with names or words or faces or email addresses or phone numbers or whatever it is you're looking for, as that data is flowing by, it is getting picked up by the Narus software.
And then when it identifies what it's looking for with those keywords or those key numbers or whatever, it automatically sends that data to NSA for analysis.
So this is, again, one of the ways that they're able to look at the cable communications, is if I route the cables in the United States without having to go to Google or Yahoo or whatever, it's got access to the cables at the point at which they transit the key hubs in the United States.
And then, again, that's when they go to the nine Internet companies that are cooperating when they aren't able to get some data that's not going through the system they're already bugging, basically.
And then, if I remember right from your book and previous conversations, the Australians at least had some real concerns that Narus was built with a backdoor so that the Israelis, well, and they needed it on the excuse they've got to update the software and fine-tune it all the time, but that they gave them ready access to whatever they wanted, or at least the Australians feared so.
Is that a concern of yours about America's intelligence system?
Yeah, I think that was Verint, not Narus.
You know what?
I'm sorry, you're right.
Of course you're right.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, Verint was a very similar company.
Again, that was formed, I think, largely in Israel, and it was used by Verizon as opposed to AT&T.
But the Australians also used them for the same reason, for the deep packet inspection and all that of data, the intelligence services in Australia.
And what happened was that, and this was in my book, The Shadow Factory, I got copies of documents from Australia where the Australian government was very concerned, the intelligence services in Australia, because all of a sudden they were discovering that it was somewhat difficult for them to access information in a database, but they noticed that the company itself, Verint, was having no problem accessing it.
And from what they were reviewing, it looked like they were accessing it from outside the country.
And then they were going to get rid of the company, and they actually called the company in and they told them they were going to fire them.
I'm not sure if they actually did, but that was what that report was about, that they called them in and asked them, why are you gaining access to our database from outside the country?
And they apologized.
They said it won't ever happen again and that kind of thing.
But what it shows is that, I mean, it's not very complicated.
All you're doing is if you have a database, you can access it from anywhere, as long as you're in control of the software, which obviously it's their software.
So it's a de facto six-eyes.
I'm sorry?
It's a de facto six-eyes program rather than a five-eyes program.
Well, it could be many more eyes.
And, you know, the problem is you can build backdoors in a lot of places, and that's one of the main dangers of this whole data surveillance program.
I mean, look at Snowden, for example.
He simply built up some flash drives or hard drives or whatever it was he had and walked out of NSA with them.
You know, he walked out in order to do something which he believed was positive, which was allow other people to see what the NSA was doing.
But think if he had some real ill intent and wanted to make millions on bribing people or make millions on selling the data he's getting, like this company that just got busted for stealing all these credit card numbers and all that.
So you've got a lot of private data, five years' worth of private data at least, sitting in some repository without your knowledge of even where it is or what's being done with it.
And you have an agency that's so lax that its employees can walk in there and walk out with, I mean, look at Manning, almost 800,000 documents or something, and then Snowden had four computers' worth of information.
So this is the agency that's supposed to be protecting everybody's communications and it's so weak that people are walking out with basically a crown jewel.
Right.
Well, you know, it's sort of like that whole controversy over ThinThread versus Trailblazer that Drake leaked about.
That was Drake, right?
Yeah.
He was the one who actually got prosecuted for some of that.
Yeah.
For telling the truth about how horrible it was.
Yeah.
His controversy, but it was also a controversy involving Bill Benny and Curt Libby and so forth.
They were all advocating this much more secure system known as ThinThread, which prevented the NSA employees from actually reading all the content unless they had a warrant.
The key was the metadata flowing by, and if they saw something suspicious then they'd have to get a warrant.
So they did away with that in favor of the Trailblazer, in which case the agency employees could read everything without, you know, they could read everything that was going by basically.
Well, but then part of the scandal too was that it didn't really work, right, and it cost way more and it was just a big, because it was a political decision to use Trailblazer rather than Expert One.
Well, yeah, the director, Michael Hayden, was called into Congress numerous times and he had to go into Congress with his tail between his legs because he had wasted so much money on Trailblazer, billions and billions of dollars it was over budget and behind, and they basically had to do away with it completely, and then they replaced it largely with another program called Turbulence.
I don't know who comes up with these names, but it wasn't a very brilliant name for a program that you want to succeed.
Turbulence.
Well, their incompetence is our only saving grace it looks like to me, Jim.
Now, I'm sorry we're so short on time, but can you talk to us a little bit about the massive offensive power of the NSA that this General Keith Alexander has gathered unto himself?
Yeah, that was a piece I did in this month, well, July issue of Wired Magazine's cover story, and I did it on directly the first really in-depth look at both the director of NSA and his role as commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and that's the role where he is in charge of all this cyber warfare, and it's a very scary thing because now he has the authority basically and the ability to launch a war, a cyber war, which they've already done against Iran.
It's the first time the U.S. has ever, the first time any country in the history of the world has ever used cyber to actually destroy an infrastructure, destroy the centrifuges in Iran, and now it has the capability of doing a great deal of damage.
It can take down a power plant or an entire power grid for a country.
It can take down a dam.
There's a lot of things it can do, and that's what the article focuses upon is this mysterious guy that nobody's ever heard of practically at the time.
Now, a few people have heard of General Alexander because of his nose and that thing, but at the time almost nobody had heard of him, and yet he has this enormous amount of power.
He's not only got the NSA under him, the largest intelligence agency in the world, 35,000 people, but he's got now his own military.
He's got the 2nd U.S. Army, the 24th Air Force Wing, and the 10th U.S. Navy Fleet that all report directly to him as commander of cyber command.
So he's got this enormous power both on intelligence and the military and in cyber now.
So I was really amazed that nobody had written an in-depth piece about him before this.
Yeah, boy, and you've got to figure his files on the politicians in D.C. controlling all the purse strings and oversight and everything, got to make J. Edgar Hoover look like an upstart.
I think Hoover would have been overjoyed if he could have had the access to data that Alexander has.
Hey, thanks very much for your time again, Jim.
It's great to talk to you.
Appreciate it.
No problem.
Good talking to you, Scott.
Bye-bye.
All right, that is the great Jim Bamford.
He's the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, A Pretext for War, and The Shadow Factory.
He's got a piece at Wired called The Secret War and another at the New York Review of Books called They Know Much More Than You Think.
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