Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. 465 pages.
The National Security Agency is many times larger than the CIA, and
since 1952 has spent many billions more per year. That didn't stop
journalists from ignoring it, which suited NSA just fine. The story was
too tough (or too career-threatening) for them; it took a mild-mannered,
unassuming 35-year-old lawyer from Natick, Massachusetts to come along and
blow the lid off. His only tools were persistence, shoe leather, and a
tolerance for dusty library shelves in obscure archives. It was enough to
get folks upset. The government reclassified some documents and warned
Bamford "not to publish or communicate the information." Newsweek -- while
grudgingly admitting that the book is "fascinating" and "revealing" --
spent more space quoting inside sources regarding the book's errors and
insisted that "the threat the NSA poses to the privacy of Americans is not
nearly so dire as Bamford would have it" (1982-09-06).
NSA is located in Fort Meade, Maryland in twenty buildings with a
dozen acres of underground computers. In 1978 it controlled 68,000 people
to listen in on the world's communications, analyze satellite eavesdropping
systems, and develop and break codes. Numerous listening posts are spread
around the globe, and 40 tons of classified documents are sent to the
shredder each day. Your tax dollars are hard at work.
ISBN 0-395-31286-8
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