The book is "a disservice" to the NSA employees who seek to protect the nation while safeguarding Americans' privacy, an agency spokeswoman, Judith A. Emmel, said in a statement. Of course, the agency's eavesdroppers and analysts are motivated, hard-working people, often forward-deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army Sgt. Trista Leah Moretti, an NSA cryptologist killed in a mortar attack in southern Iraq on June 25, 2007, is the most recent entry on the agency's Memorial Wall.
The NSA's former director, Michael Hayden, once described the NSA's eavesdroppers as "people who ... go shopping in Glen Burnie and their kids play soccer in Laurel. And they know the law. They know American privacy better than the average American, and they're dedicated to it."
But as history has proved time and time again, dedicated and well-intentioned people can be overwhelmed by the imperatives of the institution within which they work.
Can the NSA itself be trusted, in secret, to make the fine judgment calls between protecting Americans and spying on them?
Bamford's history is not reassuring. It was Hayden, after all, who authorized Operation Highlander. It siphoned all phone and e-mail traffic off the Inmarsat satellite communications system used by American troops, the Red Cross, the U.N. and journalists, including those at The Baltimore Sun, to call home from Iraq. NSA analysts listened in on and recorded "incredibly intimate personal conversations," one analyst told Bamford, who said she was shocked and distressed (her story has been corroborated by some of her NSA colleagues and disputed by others). On any given day, Bamford writes, the NSA had been spying on as many as 500 Americans at home and 7,000 abroad.
Even now, he writes, the NSA has "the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss."
Despite Bamford's burning distrust of the agency, he got and shares astonishing access to No Such Agency, as the NSA is sometimes known. Here, courtesy of the eavesdroppers, is Osama bin Laden's phone number: 00-873-6825-0533 (surely disconnected by this time).
Most convincingly, Bamford guides the reader through the NSA's greatest challenge: staying ahead of the explosive growth in volume and types of communications.
