02/09/09 – James Bamford – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing James Bamford.
He's the, I think, probably now legendary author of books about the National Security Agency, the Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and the newest one, The Shadow Factory.
Also in there was a pretext for war, not about the NSA, but another great book.
And this one, The Shadow Factory, is really something else.
I urge everyone to go out and get it or order it off the Internet.
Get it delivered right to your mailbox.
It's a shame to think you'd have all this information in a book and people hadn't read it, because this is just page after page of groundbreaking work.
So you definitely deserve a lot of credit for it.
And it was great to actually see the video of a lot of your work that we talked about the last time that we spoke, Jim, on NOVA the other night, the NOVA special about the National Security Agency, where they showed your work, where you actually went to the Al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen, went to Malaysia where the meeting was held, the conspiracy for the September 11th attacks, and all this kind of stuff.
And it's really interesting to see how much work you really put into writing each one of these books, traveling the whole world, really, huh?
Well, thanks, Scott.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
Yeah, it was fascinating doing the research and then actually going to the places where all this took place, especially in Yemen where we found bin Laden's operations center, his former operations center.
That's where the original message was sent out from and was received, that NSA intercepted the message sending the first two hijackers on the first part of their mission, Khalid al-Midar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
They were sent from there to Kuala Lumpur.
And that was the message that NSA intercepted in sort of the beginning of 9-11.
So it was very fascinating finding the house.
It took a while once we were in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, to actually find where that house was.
It got a little hairy a couple of times when we were trying to look for it because it's in a really pretty bad section of town, and people don't like cameras shooting locations like that.
Yeah, well, I can imagine so.
And really, there's a lot of stuff in the book that didn't make the NOVA thing, so if people saw the special, that's just a taste.
And in fact, it's apparent from the writing that you went a lot more places than are featured in the TV special as well.
And in fact, they focused a lot on the September 11th attacks and what the NSA knew and could have done about them, as we did the last time we spoke.
And that archive is available at antiwar.com slash radio.
It's from last October 22nd.
And we focused mostly on the 9-11 part of the story in that.
But I wanted to give you a chance to, I think, kind of fill in what was left out of NOVA the other night, which was the extent of the law-breaking and the violating of Americans' rights that began taking place during the Bush administration.
I don't necessarily want to say it's ended now, because I don't really know exactly where we stand now, but NOVA seemed to kind of want to ignore just how terribly in violation of the law the Bush administration was and to what extent they actually began to turn the entire national security intelligence apparatus and all of that electronic eavesdropping capability against the American people.
Well, the purpose of NOVA was, I mean, there's two programs somewhere that focus on major issues on PBS.
One is Frontline, the other is NOVA.
Frontline focuses on the political aspect.
The beauty of NOVA was we were focusing on the technology, how it's done.
You only have less than an hour.
Right.
Not much time.
So it gave us a unique opportunity to be able to show the public exactly how it worked and how the communications was intercepted.
We spent the whole hour talking about why it shouldn't have been done, and we wouldn't have had any time to do the story about how it's done.
And there's been a lot of commentary.
I read a whole book about why it shouldn't have been done.
So the beauty of NOVA is to show how it's accomplished, how NSA manages to pull in all this information, what it does with it, where it's pulled in from.
We actually shot the base.
I got onto the base down in Georgia, near Augusta, Georgia, where NSA does all its eavesdropping on the Middle East.
So we were able to put up on television visuals, video, of all these places that I actually wrote about.
It was really fascinating actually seeing how the system worked.
We traced an email message all the way from Kuala Lumpur to the building in San Francisco where NSA has a secret room, traced it to the beach where the cable first comes ashore, to this little facility where AT&T receives all these cables in San Luis Obispo, and then up to San Francisco.
One of the key points we made on the program was the fact that if all NSA wanted to do was to tap into the international communications in and out of the United States, the perfect place to do that is in this little building that we showed in San Luis Obispo, because that's where all the cables enter and terminate.
So if you put your secret room there, you're getting just the information that's coming from Asia and just the information that's going to Asia.
But instead they put the secret room in AT&T's major switching facility, this very large building, 10-story building in downtown San Francisco.
What makes that very suspicious is that's not only where you get a lot of the international communications coming in, but it's also where a lot of the domestic communications get intermingled with it.
So NSA is picking up not just the information coming and going from foreign countries, but it's picking up internal U.S. communications by building a secret room in that building.
You say in the book, don't you, that there are splitter rooms like this at basically all the AT&T headquarters.
There are 30 of them or something around the country too, right?
Not just at that one.
Among the people we interviewed was Mark Klein, who was a long-time technician.
He worked at AT&T for his whole career, and he was in charge of one of the floors in that building.
He had been doing this a long time.
He knew what cables went where and how things were done.
He graduated from Cornell and spent most of his career as a communications engineer.
One day he discovered this secret room, and he didn't have a key to it.
Nobody knew he had a key to it, and the only way to get access was through a secret combination.
The only person that had that was an employee that had previously been associated with the NSA or had been cleared by the NSA.
He was the one that first tipped the world off to the fact that NSA had this secret room, and he managed to get a number of documents out of the AT&T facility showing exactly how the engineering was done in the room.
Among the things he told us was that in talking to other people, he found out there were similar rooms to that in probably at least between half a dozen and a dozen other AT&T facilities.
This amounts to basically, if I understand your book correctly, all the web traffic, everything that Americans do online is intercepted by the government, whether it's making phone calls or instant messages or contact lists on our web mail account or any of these things.
All of it, all of our search terms in the search engines, right?
Yeah, what it does is the cables come into one of the floors in this building, and these are fiber optic cables, the way communications are transmitted these days through glass fibers, and the actual communications are done with photons, the light signals.
So the cables come into the room, and then they go into this device known as a splitter box, which is basically a series of prisms, and each cable is split at that point, and one side of the cable goes the way it's supposed to go to Kansas or to New York or to Florida, wherever the communication is supposed to go, it goes on its way unhindered.
And an identical copy of everything, an identical version of that cable, sort of a clone version of that cable, then goes down to NSA's secret room, one floor below.
So you have all these cables come in, they go through these splitter boxes, duplicates are made of everything, and while one copy goes on its normal course of travel, the other copies go down to the NSA's secret room and are subjected to NSA analysis.
One of those cables contains email or instant message or any kind of data that has a name like James Bamford or an email address that they're interested in or a word or a phrase or anything that they've programmed into the computer.
And you have to realize that there's more than half a million names now on the watch list.
So that information is put into the computers, and any time there's a hit on a name, an address, a word, a phrase, that information then gets forwarded on to NSA.
So, in essence, this would be the equivalent maybe 20 years ago, 30 years ago, of the U.S. Post Office opening every piece of mail coming into the Post Office to see who it's from, who it's going to, whether there's any keywords in there.
And I don't think people back then would have put up with the U.S. government opening and reading their mail.
And that's why I hope that there's more of a reaction to the Bush administration's implementation of this warrantless eavesdropping than there has been, because right now it appears that they've gotten away with it.
Nobody was charged, nobody was indicted, even though that's a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Well, and they clearly admitted it.
George Bush, the day after the New York Times finally broke the story, Ryerson and Lickblau, when they broke the story, he came out and he said, Yeah, that's right, I did it, and I'm going to keep on doing it.
And then I guess later on he decided that they would abide by the FISA statute, but then the Congress went and amended the FISA statute, if I understand right, to basically legalize what he'd done and allow them to continue this on.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
The Congress changed the law.
I mean, this is what Bush could have done in the first place if he really wanted to do this, was go to Congress, have them change the law so that it reflected the changes he wanted to make.
The problem was he didn't do that.
He didn't follow the legal route, at least not for the first four years or so.
During that whole period of time, before the Congress enacted the Protect America Act and later the amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the time between 9-11 when the warrantless eavesdropping program began and the time when Congress started taking action to rewrite the eavesdropping laws, all that was illegal eavesdropping.
There was no authorization for that.
It was a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that's a criminal statute.
It's a felony.
It carries five years in prison for every violation, every time somebody is illegally surveilled.
Well, so under the current law, I mean the Fourth Amendment notwithstanding, because apparently it's not standing, under the current law, the amendments bill that they passed coming up on a year ago, does that basically still allow the kind of carte blanche that was going on under Bush's edict?
Well, no, because they have written into the law a rule for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
When Bush was involved with this warrantless eavesdropping, they had basically completely bypassed the court.
It would be shown to the presiding judge in the court, but it wouldn't go to the court per se.
And even though the chief judge could look at it, the chief judge didn't have any right to object to it.
So they completely cut out the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was the only buffer between NSA and the public.
So when Congress created these new amendments that changed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act basically, it rewrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into it, but now the court has been watered down a great deal on the new bill.
It basically has the authority to look at the procedures that are used, the general procedures, and okay, the general procedures, but it's still not given authority to review every name that is submitted for eavesdropping.
So does that mean that the computers are all still vacuuming up every email I send, whether they're authorized to look at it or not?
Yeah, I think it's probably expanded since then, because now they feel they have the infimature of a congressionally passed law.
I would assume it's expanding, and that was one of the other areas we got into in the NOVA program was not just the question of legality, but the question of efficiency.
The agency has a hard time handling normal amounts of information, let alone the flood of information that comes in from all these intercept facilities.
It has very few linguists.
I interviewed two of the NSA intercept operators, and they were both stationed at the NSA's principal Middle East listening post at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and they were saying that there was nobody there, no zero number of people there that spoke Pashtun, which is one of the key languages in Afghanistan at the time we went to war with Afghanistan.
It was sort of like going to World War II against the Japanese and having nobody that spoke Japanese, or going to war with Russia and having nobody that spoke Russian.
So, you know, NSA is pulling all this stuff in.
The question is, how useful is it?
They're being swamped.
You know, how many people say key words in their e-mails or key combination of e-mails?
And how many people does NSA have to read all this stuff?
And if they're reading American communications, why aren't they reading, instead, you know, communications between Pakistan and Afghanistan or whatever?
You only have a finite number of people who have a finite number of capabilities.
And as one of the intercept operators told me, she felt she was wasting her time listening to Americans when, you know, she had joined basically to fight terrorism and eavesdrop on the enemy.
Well, and that's why it all comes down to the software, right?
Because if they have her eavesdropping on some soldier talking to his wife back home from Iraq or something like that, you know, this flood of e-mails that may make reference to all kinds of things in all kinds of different contexts, it all comes down to how smart you can make the computer at deciphering what's of value and what's not.
And I guess the way you report it in the book is that basically the Israelis won the contract for deciphering the global information or total information awareness here and deciding what's valuable information and what's not.
Because, for example, when I e-mail you, it's cool because the TV show I get to imagine, I got the great visual thing from Nova, and I get to imagine, like, I e-mail James Bamford from my BlackBerry and it bounces from here to there and the NSA gets it off the prism this way and the call gets routed like it was supposed to the other way and you answer back and we arrange interview time.
And, I mean, certainly, well, I don't know, I would think it's a pretty safe bet that they're monitoring you, but how do they decide whether your communication with me is worth paying any attention to or whether they only want to pay attention when you're talking to their former employees, that kind of thing.
It's got to be automatic, right?
The computer's got to be able to figure that out.
Yeah, well, it's handled different ways, e-mail communications and telephone communications.
With e-mail, they could, you know, simply put my e-mail address in and everything going to me or coming from me would be picked up by it.
Or they could program it so that it only picks up the communications when your e-mail address contacts my e-mail address.
They could do whatever they want.
I mean, they could program it however they want.
But doing the e-mails can be done largely by machine analysis.
They could have machines that pick these out.
But on the telephone calls, which is what these intercept operators were working on, they were actually sitting there with earphones on listening to people call, and they're taking in everything.
They were American journalists calling their editors, calling their spouses back in the U.S., American soldiers in the war zone calling their wives or husbands back in the U.S., and, you know, thinking that these are very private conversations or having very intimate discussions, not knowing that there's people in the state of Georgia that are listening to it and frequently laughing about the conversations and passing them around the spaces.
So the other thing is that once those calls are recorded, according to the people I interviewed, nobody erases them.
They're there forever.
And one of the things that I uncovered for my book, The Shadow Factory, was the fact that NSA is currently building a new storage facility in Texas.
It's a data storage facility that is going to be almost the size of the Alamo Dome for storing data.
And you can see why now that they need such an enormous facility to store data.
They take in all this communications information, a lot of it between Americans, and never bother to erase any of it.
Well, I'm confused, or not really confused, or maybe I am, but you're not saying that they only have humans to listen to the phone calls, right?
Because don't they have the software that can decipher, I think you say in the book, it can decipher the same voice on any phone number and even figure out how mad you are, and that kind of thing.
No, that's if you're targeting a particular person or whatever.
But from everybody I've talked to, right now NSA is not advanced further than having a human being listen to a human being.
Oh, that's reassuring then, because I guess I figured that it was just as automated, that the people who were doing the listening, for the most part, that maybe I guess I thought those people down in Georgia were the exception or something, but mostly the people doing the listening were getting phone calls that had already been referred to them by the computer that had flagged it for some reason.
Well, the computer picks up these communications, and you can program the computer to pick up whatever you want in terms of telephone numbers, but the computer doesn't do an analysis of voice content of the phone call.
It just isolates phone calls based on telephone numbers, and what the UNICEF operators were saying was that they would get Americans calling, you know, innocent Americans calling innocent Americans, and they could easily just push a button, and the next time the satellite and the computer picked up that phone number or that phone number going to, you know, the home phone number, it would just be rejected.
It wouldn't be put in what they call the queue.
It wouldn't be put in the bank of calls that the NSA people are listening to, but they were told they weren't supposed to delete any of those numbers, and that means that they're actually targeted.
So once it picks up and you don't delete it, from then on it will continually pick up that phone call, which means that if you're leaving it in there, you're targeting that number from then on.
So those American numbers were then being targeted.
But the technology at NSA has not advanced to the point where it could have a machine listen to the human voice and transcribe it or analyze it.
So, you know, human beings sitting there listening.
That's why they're expanding the NSA Georgia facility now.
Well, I was going to say, how many people are we talking about?
About 4,000 people.
Because, I mean, what percentage of phone calls are these people actually able to listen to them?
I mean, it's got to be a teeny tiny percentage, unless you just have fields and fields of spies like wheat, right?
Well, the ones they're listening to, one of the intercept operators I was talking to worked in a facility at Fort Gordon where they targeted the MMRSAT satellite.
That was the satellite that is used by people in the Middle East, mostly Americans actually, to communicate.
The system that's being used, the MMRSAT, was used at one time by Osama bin Laden also.
So the idea was to pull everything off that satellite, all the communications.
And, yeah, it would be all pulled off and some would go to one person, some others would go to another person, some others would go to another person.
But the whole idea is to pick everything off that satellite.
Now, they don't always have to transcribe every single phone call.
I mean, if it's a phone call that doesn't have any intelligence relevance, they wouldn't necessarily transcribe every word.
But it does get recorded, and nobody erases the recording for those phone calls.
So if you had a phone call with your wife or with your editor or somebody else three years ago, there's a good chance that that actual voice phone call is in storage, possibly down at the NSA facility in Texas.
Well, you know, I once...
It's very scary if you do a, you know, somebody down there with malicious intent decides to do a search and find all the communications that, you know, somebody may be running for office.
It could be used for political reasons.
There's no reason at all to save all that stuff.
And there should be laws saying that it should be erased.
As far as I know, they haven't included that in any of the new bills.
Well, I one time recorded an interview with Glenn Greenwald about the legal aspects of just this kind of thing, and my computer crashed, and I lost the recording.
And I wonder if I could go to Georgia somewhere and get my lost Greenwald interview.
Well, you have to understand also that NSA, in terms of voice intercept telephone calls, they're focusing almost exclusively on international communications, communications to and from the U.S.
Oh, yeah, well, I was going to build in that.
He was out of the country at the time that we spoke as well, so...
Well, then that could, you know, there's a good chance they could have it.
If it's purely domestic...
Not that that would make it worth it.
If it's purely domestic, then that would be the FBI that would be involved.
Now, I just like to think that there's a backup archive of this show somewhere, you know, in case of worst-case scenario.
Tell me about the...
Well, when I wrote The Puzzle Palace a long time ago, I did a lot of radio programs and TV programs and so forth after the book came out.
My publisher was called Mifflin in Boston, and they had a clipping service, and they'd send me some clips that clipped it by my name appeared in a newspaper or something like that.
But it wasn't until I sent a Freedom of Information Act request to NSA for requesting my old file that I got this massive transcript.
Almost every show I was ever on, they had a transcript of it.
Creepy.
And so it was sort of like having a free clipping service where they had a transcript of all my radio programs.
Wow.
Now, did they have a FISA warrant for that, or under what jurisdiction?
Were they tapping your phone?
That's admitting a felony to you right there, isn't it?
Well, they weren't tapping my phone.
Oh, no, they were just listening to the show.
Yeah, that's all.
Yeah, that's public domain.
Yeah, yeah, I gotcha.
I'm an idiot.
I gotcha.
That's interesting, though, to know how close attention they paid to your work.
Tell me about the role of Israeli companies in writing the software for a lot of this spying and, I don't know, possible security breaches that that might entail?
Well, yeah, two of the key companies that are involved in actually placing the equipment in the rooms and actually supplying the equipment and the software in the rooms were companies that were originally formed in Israel.
They're small companies, few people have ever really heard about.
But, you know, these are companies that build the facilities, the hardware and software, through which millions of communications, American communications, pass.
And the NSA uses it to isolate and intercept a lot of these communications or analyze a lot of these communications.
So, in my book, I showed how one of these companies, a company called Barron, for example, which works on behalf of Verizon, Verizon uses Barron, few people had ever heard of Barron, yet here it is at the heart of NSA's eavesdropping system.
And the people who run it, you know, are people that you have to really wonder about.
The chief executive officer of the company is currently a fugitive, hiding out in the former chief executive officer, the guy that founded the company, basically, is now a fugitive hiding out in Africa, wanted for theft.
Oh, I thought they caught him.
Didn't somebody catch him down there?
Well, not that I've heard, at least it hasn't crossed my desk yet.
I don't think they've caught him.
Well, they did actually, I mean, they did arrest him at one point in Namibia, the Namibian government, on behalf of a U.S. warrant.
And they kept him in jail for a brief time and then they let him go.
Oh, that's what I was thinking of.
I didn't realize he'd been released then, I guess.
Yeah, now he was only in jail for a few days, I think, and then he was released and allowed to return to his house there.
He's got lots of money, allegedly embezzled a great deal of money.
He's been indicted for all this theft, millions and millions of dollars.
And he's kind of using that money to make donations to the Namibian government and so forth to sort of place himself in a good position with the Namibian government so they won't extradite him.
And then the two other senior executives from the company pled guilty to fraud.
Now, these are the people who are running or devising the equipment and the hardware and the software through which a lot of Americans' financial information is passed and personal information.
So this is something that Congress has never looked into, the origins of these companies, who are these people, where do they come from, why are we allowing companies that were formed in foreign countries to play such an intimate role in NSA's eavesdropping.
Why doesn't NSA just develop the equipment itself and put it in there?
So these are all questions that really the Congress should ask at some point.
Does it just kind of go without saying, do you think, that they have a backdoor into whatever they want or it seems like they might?
There's no way I can tell whether they do.
The point is, though, that...
They could.
The point is, why do you have to have a company that had foreign ties, that was formed by people in another country, do such important work, or such sensitive work?
It just doesn't make much sense to me.
What companies are there in the U.S. that could do this?
There's a question that you have to raise when NSA does business with companies that have their origins in foreign countries.
Again, Congress pays such little attention to the NSA, especially how it does its job, that I'm not really surprised that they haven't paid much attention to it.
Well, you know, Jim, your book ends on a note from Frank Church, who was the senator who was the chairman of the committee that investigated abuses of the intelligence community back in the 1970s.
And it was basically his conclusion way back then, never mind our high-tech revolution we've had since, that the powers of the National Security Agency, if turned against the American people without law, could create tyranny unheard of in Orwell's worst nightmares.
And then you conclude that the only thing protecting us from that fate at this point is the old law, our Constitution left over from the 1780s, and the laws that enforce those protections of our rights.
Without that, they could turn this society into a real nightmare.
With this kind of ability to surveil people's activities, it translates directly into control at some point, doesn't it?
Well, yeah.
As I mentioned, the watch list before 9-11 was 20 names.
Now it's over half a million.
And when Frank Church said those words, he was very shocked at what he found at NSA.
That was back around 1975.
That was back before NSA had anywhere near the capability it has now.
Back then, the only thing the NSA could do was listen to somebody's hardline telephone and maybe read a telegram or whatever.
But today, NSA has the capability to almost get into your thoughts.
Because if you just think of it, how much of what goes on in your mind or in your personal life is communicated in one way or another, either over a cell phone, as you're walking down the street in a car, or on a BlackBerry, or on your iPhone, or on your computer in e-mails.
All this information that used to be wrapped in envelopes and put in the mail and so forth, letters and that kind of thing, are now open for NSA's analysis because of their access to all the digital media.
Whatever was a concern to Frank Church back in the 1970s, it's beyond comprehension what NSA's capabilities are today.
And that's why it frustrated me a great deal, the fact that when Church created his Senate Intelligence Committee, which was the very first Senate Intelligence Committee, the whole thrust for at least the first five or ten years, or maybe even longer, ten or fifteen years, was to protect the American public from the intelligence agencies.
That's the whole purpose of setting it up, was oversight and protection.
But beginning around the 1990s, that emphasis changed.
The emphasis is now on protecting the intelligence agencies from the public, basically, and acting as a cheering gallery for the intelligence agencies.
The whole protection side, I think, has gone completely out of the window, as you can see during the Bush years.
So all these things, I have no idea what's going to happen during the Obama administration, but these are some of the things I'm hopeful that may get some correction.
All right, everybody, that's James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory.
Before that, A Pretext for War, Body of Secrets, and The Puzzle Palace.
And is there an official website for the book, anything like that, where people can look into this a little more?
No, I'm just a one-man band here.
Well, they can certainly check out the NOVA archive, I'm sure, is online from the special that they did the other night.
If you go to the PBS website and then click on NOVA, you can actually watch the program that we did last Tuesday.
It was called The Spy Factory.
My latest book is called The Shadow Factory, and the NOVA program was called The Spy Factory.
And you can actually just watch it online.
You just click on the link and watch the show.
And they actually go good together.
I mean, you read the book and then you watch the video, you can see the actual places that I write about.
So, again, it's a good opportunity to sort of get an insight into how NSA is going about its secret activities.
Well, and people should know that we just barely can scratch the surface in an interview like this.
The book is just packed with news-breaking stories and just incredible mind-boggling stuff when you talk about the level of surveillance and the detail.
It really creeped me out, I've got to tell you.
It really bothered me when I read it.
I'm only getting over it now, that was a few months ago.
Thanks very much.
Really appreciate it, Jim.
Thanks for having me on your show.