All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
You're listening to Antiwar Radio.
We're on ChaosRadioAustin.org and the Liberty Radio Network at LRN.
FM, also at AnomalyRadio.com, Antiwar.com/radio, all over the dang place.
And on radio stations, too.
I don't even know where.
Not anymore.
Anyway, so our first guest on the show today is the heroic Jim Bamford, James Bamford.
I call him Jim.
He's the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, A Pretext for War, and The Shadow Factory, The Ultra Secret NSA, from 9-11 to the eavesdropping on America.
He's written very important pieces all over the place, Rolling Stone and I think, I don't know, I shouldn't say anymore because I'm not too sure, but every newspaper in the world.
And you know the guy.
Also, check out the NOVA special, The Spy Factory.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Great.
Thanks, Scott.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And I really seriously, everybody in the audience, I highly encourage you to read Jim's work.
He's written a lot of great articles in Rolling Stone and other magazines, articles, very important articles in very important newspapers and so forth.
And his books on the National Security Agency are the source for what you can learn about what they're doing.
And The Shadow Factory will, it'll blow your mind.
It's crazy.
I read it and then I listened to the whole thing on audiobook too, and then I watched the NOVA special about it too, and my head still just swims.
And so that's why I'm happy to have Jim back on the show to try to blow y'all's mind as well and get your head around or try to help get your head around the structure of the American telecommunications industry.
Its hardware and its relationship with the national government of the United States, with the military, because after all, Jim, the National Security Agency is the military, isn't it?
That's right.
It comes under the Pentagon.
The boss of the director of the NSA is the Secretary of Defense.
And so I guess if I could ask you to just sort of try to sketch the thing.
You know, people sort of have a map of America in their mind.
How does this thing work?
We've got all our Internet tubes and cables everywhere.
And somehow, to some degree, the National Security Agency is, as you so thoroughly document in your book, they're tapped in not just to what the Russians are doing but what we're doing as well.
How does it work?
Well, it's very complex.
So basically the way the system works is most of the information these days comes one of two ways.
It comes either by satellite or by undersea cable.
And in either case, the NSA has a great deal of interception capability in place, sort of wired into the infrastructure.
If it's satellite communications, the NSA has two very large satellite interception facilities, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, that encompasses virtually everything that would come into the United States.
The one on the East Coast is in West Virginia, a little place called Sugar Grove, West Virginia.
It's a little valley that you can't see from any highway or any road.
It's in an area called the radio quiet zone, so there can't be any other communications in that area so that you can pick up the communications that you're intercepting very easily.
And then there's a similar facility out on the West Coast.
And if you're trying to intercept communication that comes from undersea cables or underground cables, the NSA is very wired into that system also, largely by having interception rooms in these facilities where the communications first come into the United States, such as in San Francisco, for example, which is sort of the endpoint for a lot of communications coming in from the Far East.
And a few years ago, NSA built a small room in the AT&T facility there, a very secret room that only people with a very high clearance and just really a few people that work for the NSA are allowed into it.
And what happens is the communications comes into the facility, this very large AT&T facility.
It goes into the switching room, basically, and then there's this device that splits the communications.
It takes the fiber optics, which is basically a light signal, and it creates a duplicate signal.
It's like a prism.
So the light comes in and then one signal comes in, and then after it goes through the prism, two signals come out.
One of those waves goes where it should go to the public or whoever the communications is directed to.
But then the second, the duplicate signal, goes down one flight below to the NSA's very secret room.
And there it gets filtered through all kinds of NSA filtering equipment, looking for names or particular e-mail, looking for names or words or phrases or e-mail addresses, anything that might be in the watch list or anything that they're targeting.
And the watch list now is, again, approaching about a million names, so there's quite a bit that they're filtering out from that system.
And what they filter out goes on to NSA for further analysis.
All right, now, hold it right there, Jim.
Everybody, it's James Bamford, the heroic James Bamford.
The book is The Shadow Factory, The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9-11 to the Eavesdropping on America.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're on ChaosRadioAustin.org, LRN.
FM, the Anomaly Radio Network at AnomalyRadio.com, Antiwar.com/radio, and on and on and on like that.
We're talking with Jim Bamford.
He's the author of all the most important books about the National Security Agency.
And, Jim, you were describing kind of the form of how it is that the government is able to tap in to the main switches, for example, at AT&T and download the entire Internet, their satellites.
But I guess I want to ask you, maybe from sort of the other way around, like the proven negative kind of thing, what is it that they're not tapping?
I mean, is it fair to say that every American has all of their e-mails, all their Google searches, all their everything is subject to military surveillance?
Well, it's going to be that most of it goes through the NSA system.
That doesn't mean that everything goes into NSA for now.
They just don't have enough people to do that.
But the watch list keeps growing in terms of the number of names on it.
Right.
But, I mean, Benjamin Franklin would say that's an unreasonable search if it's going through their system to be searched like in a fishing expedition kind of way in order to see whether there's something to follow.
That's a search enough.
That's like coming in your house looking for something, right?
Well, sure.
And the system used to be a lot tighter.
The NSA used to have a lot more controls and regulations on it.
There was a court or there still is a court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, FISA court.
And it had more teeth, more muscle, actually, a few years ago in order to determine who's being listened to and whose name can go on watch lists and so forth.
But then that got watered down a great deal on this last piece of legislation, the FISA amendments bill.
And it basically neutered the FISA court so that it doesn't really have very much control over who gets listened to anymore.
The teeth basically were taken out of the court.
So, again, that gives much more power to NSA.
And the fearmongers were continually saying that they need this power to fight terrorism.
And Congress weakly gave in to them.
And so now it's been greatly weakened from what it was just a few years ago.
So Bush just had a secret covert program based on his pretended authority as the commander of everything.
And then that was basically in jeopardy.
It got outed by The New York Times finally and, you know, become a problem.
I don't know if anybody ever ruled against him in court on it or anything.
But the Democrats basically hurried up and legalized this.
It was Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who led the Congress in legalizing basically what Bush was doing.
When you say that the FISA court has been neutered, if I understand it right, Jim, basically what that means is that they give out general warrants now.
The NSA comes to them and say, we want to tap e-mails.
And they go, okay.
Okay.
And then they have the authority supposedly to authorize NSA to intercept entire categories of information based on the category of it, basically legalize fishing expedition, right?
Yeah, it's a very complex piece of legislation and a lot of it is very secret.
So it's hard to explain in a sentence exactly how they do it.
But basically, yeah, the Bush administration had the warrantless eavesdropping program, which a judge in California said the last word on it and declared it was illegal.
And as far as I know, that decision has not yet been overturned.
So as far as I think the law goes, that system was declared illegal.
But then the Congress basically caved in and turned around and basically took the same system that had been declared illegal and then put the stamp of legality on it through a FISA amendment bill.
Yeah, among the people that was very much against that and also very much against giving immunity to a telecom company that cooperated, such as AT&T, was Barack Obama.
He actually, in his campaign for president, said that he was going to not only vote against, but actually filibuster against any attempt to take away or to give immunity to the telecom companies for this eavesdropping.
Yeah, Barack Obama says a lot of things, doesn't he?
Bush came to shove, and he ended up not only not filibustering against it, he ended up voting for it.
Yeah, so he joined the majority of the Democrats to pass the legislation.
Yeah, well, and so here's the problem, too, right?
Is that any time anybody tries to sue to get to, say, I don't know, the Supreme Court, and you let Clarence Thomas decide or something like that, then they rule that, no, this is all so secret that you can't sue about it.
So it's de facto all legal.
So that's the catch-22, is that I was actually part of the very first suit.
I was one of the plaintiffs in the AT&T suit by the ACLU against NSA, the original suit over the warrantless eavesdropping program.
And we won a very big win in the district court, federal district court level, where the judge declared that the system was illegal because it was eavesdropping without a warrant.
But then when it got up to the federal appeals court, they basically threw out the case because of procedural grounds, not on the substance at all, but because the plaintiffs, of which I just mentioned I was one, couldn't prove positively that we were eavesdropped on.
So in other words, you can't go to court unless you can prove that you've been eavesdropped on, but who gets eavesdropped on is top secret from the NSA.
So there's sort of no way to win.
I mean, NSA's got to come out and say, we're tapping you, or else you can't bring the suit in, and they're not telling anybody who's being tapped.
Right.
Well, and so on it goes.
But now back to how it goes.
Tell us about this software.
This must be one real smart RTD to go through all this data and figure out which bank transactions matter, which pay phone calls matter, which e-mails ought to be sent over to some cop to read through.
Well, the e-mail, the actual software is very interesting.
A lot of the software that they buy comes from companies that were originally created overseas, several of which were created in Israel.
So you have companies that are foreign companies that are designing the software and to some extent the hardware that goes into the software and hardware that is fitted between the telecom companies, the AT&T and so forth, and the NSA.
It provides the directions and sort of the information that determines who's going to be intercepted and who isn't.
So it's very interesting.
One of those companies actually was found guilty of fraud, and the chief operating officer and the president of the company fled the U.S. and was hiding out overseas.
I think he's still hiding out overseas.
So you have all this concern about people's communications, and yet Congress has no idea who's even doing the actual tapping.
So I think it's a situation that really deserves a hard look at that Congress never seems to want to give.
Well, and I believe you document in your book that it was shown that these very same systems or ones like them that came from these same Israeli companies that were being used in Australia were found to have had back doors built in, and they claimed, oh, well, this is just for maintenance so we can give you your Windows update or whatever, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I found these confidential documents that came from the Australian sort of commission that looks into eavesdropping in Australia.
It's a government commission that approves it and sort of directs it.
And at one point they had this one company, this Israeli company, that they were using the software from, and they discovered that they, the Australian government agency, wasn't able to get the information out of their databases very well, but they discovered that the Israelis were actually getting the data out better than they were, and then they were going to cancel the company's contract, and the company said, well, we won't do that again.
So it brings up a very scary thought that people not only in the U.S., but people around the world may have access to your communications.
And that's something that's really never been looked into by anybody, and that's the companies that these agencies outsource the eavesdropping to.
Outsourcing has become an enormous part in the military and in the regular intelligence agencies, but also in the eavesdropping on U.S. communications.
Even though you'd think that it's just the NSA that's doing the eavesdropping, I mean, if that's not bad enough, it's companies that nobody heard of and companies that are not even U.S. companies that are involved in that.
So I think it certainly is something that needs to be looked at, but the Congress never really wants to get into something like that because it involves getting into too many secrets and too many foreign interests.
Well, you know, I think when I was younger, back before any of this Bush scandal with any of this or whatever, I just had what I think of now as a pretty typical American understanding of how the NSA is, and that is that everyone on Earth is subject to their spying, but not us.
We're different.
We're Americans.
All that, whether or not you buy that it's to keep us safe, it's outwardly directed, and most Americans, I guess, already accept implicitly as well that no foreigner has any rights that we're bound to respect.
So that is what it is, and people don't really object that much.
But now here, like in the old saying, war is the health of the state, this is basically the Pentagon turned inwards against us, and part of any standing army are the private interests that are involved, and you really talk a lot in your book about the industry.
Is it really a city, Crystal City, where virtually every business is simply there to make money off of the Homeland Security domestic surveillance budget?
Well, Crystal City is home to an enormous number of contractors.
It sits right across the Potomac from Washington, and they have a lot of these underground facilities there, not secret underground facilities.
I mean, they have shopping centers on the ground and so forth.
It's a very interesting little city over there, but Washington is just too full of government agencies, and they've expanded across the river into Alexandria and Crystal City to a great deal.
I don't think anybody really has a good handle on how many contractors are doing all this information for the government, and then who are these contractors, and how much oversight is there?
It's just not very much.
It's very difficult for anybody to try to get a handle on that, and it doesn't seem like Congress really tries to want to get a handle on it.
Right, well, because that's the whole thing, is because those vested interests are major donors to Congress to make sure that it stays the same way.
They invest two bits, and they get back billions.
That's true, and when NSA started out, it was a fairly regulated agency.
It was not overly big, but it did do a lot of domestic eavesdropping.
Using it illegally was one of the articles against Richard Nixon, right?
Exactly.
That's what I was going to say, was that in the mid-'60s, the NSA began turning its ear for the first time internally.
Well, actually, let me back up.
It actually was eavesdropping since the very beginning on U.S. communications in the form of telegrams and so forth.
They had a thing called Operation Shamrock, and that was only discovered in the 1960s, and then Richard Nixon tried to use the organization to eavesdrop on antiwar protesters and so forth.
All that came to a head in the 1970s when the Church Committee, this committee that looked into the Intelligence Committee, discovered all the domestic eavesdropping by NSA, and that's why they created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Corps.
Throughout the entire Cold War, from the time the FISA Corps was created around 1978 to 2001, the nation managed to survive without having all this domestic eavesdropping.
The NSA obeyed the law.
The law was in place.
They were able to protect the country with the laws the way it was.
As I showed in the NOVA documentary I did, The Spy Factory, and also in my book The Shadow Factory, NSA didn't need to go to warrantless eavesdropping after 9-11, or actually before 9-11, in order to catch those hijackers.
The laws that were in place and the technology that NSA already had in place before 9-11 would have let them discover the plot.
It was just that NSA never shared the information it had with either the FBI or the CIA, and the NSA could have legally gotten the information they needed by going through the FISA Corps.
So the NSA could have, if they just did follow the rules the way they should have, they could have prevented 9-11 from taking place, and then after 9-11 the NSA went crazy expanding and trying to do all this warrantless eavesdropping, which was totally unnecessary.
Well, you know, you talk about this in your book, I believe, and then I think we developed the point a bit further with a former CIA analyst, chief of the bin Laden unit, Alex Station, Michael Scheuer, on this show, and that was that the CIA had to build their own listening station in Madagascar in order to tap the phone of Hani Handra's father-in-law, the switchboard operator, basically, at the house in Yemen, which is featured in your NOVA documentary.
There's James Bamford going, yeah, this house behind me here in Yemen is where these guys were hanging out.
So Scheuer, basically his point was that Tenet was a weasel and wouldn't go to the NSA and demand that they give up the other half of the conversation, because only the NSA had the other half of the conversation.
The CIA could only get the outgoing or something.
The point was that the NSA could get both sides of the conversation, because the NSA not only had ground stations, but it had satellites in space that were intercepting the uplink of a conversation, and you only get the downlink when you have a dish, and that's what was the problem with the CIA was they only had a dish out there.
They didn't have any satellites, so you're only getting half the conversation.
And so NSA was not, despite all the times that Scheuer went over to the NSA and tried to get it, NSA would not give them the other half of the conversation.
And, you know, if you're only listening to half the conversation, you're not really making much sense of it.
Well, you know, part of the scandal in 9-11 was just how much they knew, they being different FBI agents and supervisors and CIA guys here, and who told who about when these guys got to San Diego and all of that kind of stuff.
But as you point out in your book, there's virtually no, perhaps there is absolutely no discussion of the National Security Agency in virtually any of the journalism, and definitely not in the 9-11 commission report at all.
There's just never mind what the NSA knew, and what they were, we're not telling the CIA, the FBI coordinating together, et cetera.
That smacks of a major cover up there, doesn't it?
Well, sure, and not only that, just a very poor investigation by the 9-11 commission.
They totally overlooked the largest intelligence agency in the U.S.
It was insane that they had this enormous commission that was set up to look into 9-11, and they bypassed the major agency that was involved in it, NSA.
And that was why I did that.
One of the key reasons I did the book was Shuttle Factory, and the reason we did the TV show The Spy Factory, which got nominated for an Emmy Award.
So the idea was that NSA had the capability, not only had the capability, they were using their capability to eavesdrop on the hijackers while they were in the United States.
So while they were here for more than a year, they were eavesdropping on two of the principal hijackers, Slead Al-Minar and Nawaf al-Hazni.
And so during that time, they were picking up their communications, and as you mentioned, and as Shoyer mentioned, not passing on those conversations to either the CIA or the FBI.
We had one of the FBI agents on the show, and also in my book, who was actually in the CIA at that time, and he wanted to notify the FBI about what was going on, but the CIA wouldn't let him notify the FBI.
The CIA or the NSA wouldn't?
No, we had two agencies that were both screwing up.
The NSA refused to pass what they had on to the FBI and also the CIA, and the CIA refused to pass on what they had to the FBI.
So you had all these agencies that had key pieces of the puzzle, all refusing to pass it on to the other agencies because largely for domain issues, you know, there's ours and you can't have it, and also for secrecy issues, you know.
We only trust our own people with this information.
We don't trust you.
So had all that been worked out beforehand, they could have easily prevented 9-11.
So what happened was after 9-11, instead of just reworking the system so that it worked better, they expanded it enormously, and what happened there was that you ended up eavesdropping on so much communication that it's almost impossible for anybody to be able to pick the needle from the enormous electronic haystack.
That's why, you know, nobody was able to determine this Christmas Day bombing attempt, even though NSA had again picked up some of that key communications, even though the guy's father had gone into the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and said his son was a sense of danger in Yemen.
But again, there's so much information coming in, nobody can focus on any one piece.
So, you know, we had that incident happen, we had the Times Square bomber, and again, none of that was ever picked up by U.S. intelligence.
Even this most recent event, the one with the cargo planes and the packages from Yemen, none of that was picked up by U.S. intelligence.
It was just a lucky happenstance that the Saudis picked up intelligence and passed it on to the U.S.
Well, you know, the way I read about that one in the Christian Science Monitor, it was all very strange.
It was a guy who was a former inmate at Guantanamo, although I don't know if inmate is a legal term, former prisoner there, and then he went to Saudi Arabia, then he went to Yemen, then he came back to Saudi Arabia with the tracking numbers for these packages and stuff.
Like, who put him up to this anyway?
I don't know.
And I wonder about the Abdulmutallab, the underbomber from last Christmas, too, Jim, because he didn't make, you know, perhaps, like they say, he got on the plane in Yemen, but he changed planes in the Netherlands, and he had help.
And there's sworn witnesses that saw, you know, the well-dressed man help him get on that plane, and it was all very mysterious circumstances, it seemed like to me.
I interviewed Kurt Haskell, who was an attorney, and saw all this happen.
You know, I'm going to show.
I wish, you know, somebody of your caliber would really look into that and write the real story of that attack and what did happen in the Netherlands there, you know?
Yeah, well, I mean, that operation was planned very long in advance, and, yeah, it's a very interesting operation.
I looked into it to some degree.
There was a Brian Ross piece that said that the FBI does say that they're looking into who these other people in the Netherlands are, basically a reference to what Kurt Haskell, the lawyer, had said, but then that was the last we heard of it.
But that sounded, you know, Brian Ross, that's a pretty official confirmation, you know?
Yeah.
But, again, I think the key point in terms of what information the U.S. had was that there were key pieces of information that both the CIA had and the NSA had, but because they have so much information coming in, they're not able to, they weren't able to narrow it down and put those two pieces of information together.
The irony is that instead of tightening the system, shortening the watch list so that it's really manageable, once again they expanded it.
The watch list was nearly a million names.
They brought it down to about half a million names.
Then the Christmas Day bombing attempt took place, and then they expanded it back to, you know, a million names again.
So it just seems like nobody's ever going to take a realistic look at what we really need and what we really don't need.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, one thing that I wonder about, too, is how long before whatever the NSA has, they're mandated to just give all that to whatever local, state, and federal police about all of us.
You know what I mean?
Like, ultimately, the computer power is there to tie everybody's license plate to their IRS bill, you know, and just integrate all the police into one big homeland security force, which, by the way, that was the point of the 9-11 Commission.
That's why they didn't bother with the NSA.
It was an outcome-based commission.
They were there to recommend the creation of the new National Police Force, the DHS.
Well, that actually was what the whole idea behind the creation of the, I can't remember the name of it now, I don't know.
Oh, the Total Information Awareness there at the Pentagon.
Yeah.
Right, in your book you say they renamed it Basketball and moved it over to Maryland.
Well, once it got exposed in the press, then there was this big rush to say, oh, my God, we didn't know this thing existed, and then to shut it down, but they shut it down sort of in name only.
The organization's on paper got canceled, but then a lot of the activity that the organization was working on, which in some of it was what you were talking about before, this enormous data mining capability, was simply just pushed over to the NSA.
You know, one thing that's remarkable about this, and this is a common theme on the show on a lot of different subjects, whether it's the treatment of prisoners or the wars or whatever, is the illegality of it all and the impunity behind it, the inability of the democracy to be its self-operating, checking and balancing sort of thing like we're taught.
The president said, yeah, I'm guilty, what?
And just like he said this week about the torture, I mean, when he says he ordered waterboarding, he's saying he changed the rules to allow the torture of, we know, thousands of people across Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond.
And he says, yeah, and what are you going to do about it, like a schoolyard bully?
And the answer is nothing, right?
I mean, FISA is a felony statute.
He was guilty of what?
Millions of counts of felonies.
Well, and that's the irony of the whole thing.
Here it is that, you know, you have the federal government that goes and does all these activities as long as he's dropping the torture and so forth, and nobody's ever held accountable.
I mean, the most recent example was the destruction of the torture tapes.
And once again, nobody gets prosecuted for it.
Nobody's ever fired for anything that happened at 9-11.
Nobody gets charged for anything.
I've got to stop you there because we're coming up on the break here, but I would say that the real check and balance in this society is real journalism, like what you do, and it's greatly appreciated.
I highly urge everyone to read The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, a Pretext for War, The Shadow Factory, the ultra-secret NSA from 9-11 to the eavesdropping on America, and also at pbs.org they have the NOVA special, which is called the Spy Factory, where literally you can follow Jim around the world.
Here's where the 9-11 hijackers, some of them had their meeting in Malaysia.
Here's the switchboard in Yemen.
Here's the coast of the United States where the National Security Agency is tapping your call through this cable, and it's brilliant, and it's awesome, and it's NOVA, it's not frontline, it's the science of it all, and it's wonderful stuff.
So thank you very much, Jim, for all your work and your time on the show today.
I appreciate it.
Well, I really enjoyed it, and thanks for having me on again, Scott.
Great to be on your show.
All right.
Talk to you again soon.
Bye-bye.
