Bamford, James. The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to
the Eavesdropping on America. New York: Doubleday, 2008. 395 pages.
The National Security Agency has a problem -- they just cannot get
anything right. Before 9/11 they tried to obey the law and avoided domestic
eavesdropping and interception of American citizens abroad. NSA listened
in on the 9/11 hijackers as they were plotting, and then failed to notify
anyone when the suspects arrived in the U.S. and plotted for two more years.
After 9/11 the NSA threw out the rule book and began intercepting domestic
communications illegally, with the full cooperation of AT&T. Fiber-optic
cables would be tapped at key AT&T switches, and a copy of the traffic
sent to the NSA's computers for keyword and link analysis. AT&T's peering
partnerships with other Internet carriers, such as UUNET, Level 3, PSINet,
Sprint, and Qwest, meant that NSA was tapping nearly the entire Internet.
They also began outsourcing their eavesdropping contracts because they
lacked the in-house capacity to handle such a major expansion.
The watch list of people, both American and foreign, grew to half a
million names and produced a flood of data. You can build bigger computers
to capture more data, but these same computers don't analyze it well. The
"drinking from a firehose" problem kicks in, which means that you end up
chasing too much data with too few analysts. Also, adding contractors too
quickly creates management and compatibility problems, and cost overruns.
ISBN 978-0-385-52132-1
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