Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 148595
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 1400060346
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.1273
EAN: 9781400060344
ASIN: 1400060346
Publication Date: February 15, 2005
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Product Description
How does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on? And is the interception of communication an effective means of predicting and preventing future attacks? These are some of the questions at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant new book, Chatter.
In the late 1990s, when Keefe was a graduate student in England, he heard stories about an eavesdropping network led by the United States that spanned the planet. The system, known as Echelon, allowed America and its allies to intercept the private phone calls and e-mails of civilians and governments around the world. Taking the mystery of Echelon as his point of departure, Keefe explores the nature and context of communications interception, drawing together fascinating strands of history, fresh investigative reporting, and riveting, eye-opening anecdotes. The result is a bold and distinctive book, part detective story, part travel-writing, part essay on paranoia and secrecy in a digital age.
Chatter starts out at Menwith Hill, a secret eavesdropping station covered in mysterious, gargantuan golf balls, in England’s Yorkshire moors. From there, the narrative moves quickly to another American spy station hidden in the Australian outback; from the intelligence bureaucracy in Washington to the European Parliament in Brussels; from an abandoned National Security Agency base in the mountains of North Carolina to the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
As Keefe chases down the truth of contemporary surveillance by intelligence agencies, he unearths reams of little-known information and introduces us to a rogue’s gallery of unforgettable characters. We meet a former British eavesdropper who now listens in on the United States Air Force for sport; an intelligence translator who risked prison to reveal an American operation to spy on the United Nations Security Council; a former member of the Senate committee on intelligence who says that oversight is so bad, a lot of senators only sit on the committee for the travel.
Provocative, often funny, and alarming without being alarmist, Chatter is a journey through a bizarre and shadowy world with vast implications for our security as well as our privacy. It is also the debut of a major new voice in nonfiction.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 NSA - Eavesdropping Travelogue-Type Expose June 13, 2008
This book was written by a Yale law student who had an interested in the National Security Agency (NSA) and signals intelligence. It is a good story that is similar to a travelogue or description of the author's exploration of the subject as well as some of the actual physical sites of the world-wide signals intelligence network known as "Echelon" - operated by the U.S./UK/New Zealand, etc.
The book is solid and presents some new information regarding the subject matter. It is a good exploration of the topic of more recent signals intelligence activities.
Overall, I rate this book as excellent for what it intends to do. It is a personal journey and research into the world of NSA and SIGINT. I highly recommend it as one of many books on the NSA and global signals intelligence.
Heard it on the grapevine May 5, 2008
"Chatter" is the story of the modern system of electronic spying upon which our safety is said to depend. Author Patrick Radden Keefe has pieced the tale together, using bits of information from the infrequent slips by government spokespeople and by hard investigative work, Keefe begins with the generally unknown story of the secret US/UK intelligence sharing arrangement -- one that extends to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - that began after WWII. Keefe visits intelligence-gathering sites --such as the US-staffed facility at Menwith Hill in England. Another facility, now the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in Rosman, North Carolina -- began its life as a satellite tracking station and ended up as Department of Defense intelligence facility. The description of the station interior, with its multiple levels of security, 10,000 gallon water reservoir and miles of fiber optic cable -- give a glimpse into the inner sanctum of intelligence gathering.
But there's more to "Chatter" than descriptions of buildings and antennae. The story's political, legal and social angles also fascinate Keefe. The ability of the government to spy on its enemies has a dark, flip side: the possibility to spy on political enemies closer to home. Keefe discusses the increasing level of power given to the National Security Agency, the Department of Defense's shadowy intelligence arm. Keefe highlights the overall lack of accountability that Americans (through their congressional representatives) have granted to those whose motives and methods, ominously, cannot be divulged, even to the peoples' representatives.
"Chatter" offers us a peephole into the world of SIGINT -- signal intelligence gather from the airwaves -- and HUMINT -- the intelllgence gather by human agents on the ground.Keefe makes clear the limits of SIGINT, which has notorious misses -- including the Cole bombing, African Embassy bombings and notably, the 9/11 attacks. He argues persuasively for more focus on the HUMINT side of the equation. So far, our leaders, loath perhaps to risk human lives, have chosen to continue to fund gadgets over linguists and other human operatives.
Keefe lays out the arguments to those who claim that the 9/11 attacks indicate the need for more strenuous intel efforts - disregarding the niceties of "abstract" constitutional protections like the Fourth Amendment. But while these arguments seem forceful, Keefe counters with a tale of intel gone bad - the misleading and erroneous "dog and pony" show" that Secretary of State Colin Powell put on at the UN in the run-up to the Iraq War. Keefe urges a vigorous discussion over the precise location of the line between privacy rights and security needs. So far, that discussion has not begun. In a world in which unaccountable agents, who have kept even elected heads of state in the dark about the purposes, are given so much unsupervised power, Keefe feels that citizens have a right and a duty to be concerned.
"Chatter is a compelling read, wide-ranging and insightful, and free of the paranoid rantings one might fear from such a work. The book is hard-headed about the need for intelligence gathering in a post-9/11 world, but clear-eyed about the threat to civil liberties. "Chatter" is a smart book that has a point of view without losing its even-handedness.
Good Survey on the NSA April 9, 2007
Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping is something of a amateurish book done responsibly. Patrick Radden Keefe isn't an insider, he isn't a former spook, and he isn't a journalist with a lifelong Intel beat. He's a student a writer, frequently concentrating on issues of globalization, crime, and government. I think where a lot of people are disappointed with this book is that he doesn't write as an insider and he doesn't expose things that we couldn't find out from other sources. Instead, he's collected what's known through an exhaustive process of library and field research and placed it in a single volume giving the reader an overview of what is a highly secretive organization.
When something like the NSA is around for more than half a century it's bound to leave footprints in the public record, from mentions in court cases to acquisitions in related but public budget allocations. Keefe tirelessly connects the dots on these pinpoints of information, assembling a working knowledge of what they seem to be able to do or not do. I found it refreshing that an author would approach this sensitive subject matter not as a tell-all expose, but as a careful dissemination of facts with an eye toward not embellishing on an area so secret that one might say anything without being able to be proved false (or true for that matter).
Particularly striking, but within the realm of common sense, was the trouble the NSA has had keeping up with other technology. When advertising and internet data mining has reached a level where our intelligence service must take out patents to protect their own processes, there's a dearth of ability when it comes to being all-seeing, all-hearing. While they can see and hear almost all communication, they don't have the hardware or manpower to be able to completely or accurately sort through that amount of data to pick out many pertinent details. It's an exercise in futility, it seems from Keefe's description. Just because they can doesn't mean they can very well. I was also surprised by the lack of evidence to any success at electronically picking out words from speech. I, and most people, had just assumed that any key words would be flagged by computers, but as I use my cell phone now, I think about the challenge for a machine to recognize and separate out what I'm saying.
It's a good book, and a fine overview. It's not a great book, but it did sort out its premise early on and met it completely. One can't pan the author for what he didn't do, when those things were simply beyond his ability or, in this case, anyone else's.
CV Rick
 Unqualified author November 13, 2006
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
Signals intelligence is a technical and complicated field. Besides standard intelligence techniques, it involves mathematics, engineering and politics. Keefe manages to cover remarkably little of this. Instead he focuses on speculative theories and nearly irrelevant current event news headlines. Perhaps the lack of information is not too surprising given how most modern information in this field is classified by various organizations, but what Keefe comes up with is hardly appropriate for a book.
There is some decent information to be found, but the bottom line is that Keefe comes across as a college kid on a writing assignment for his school paper.
 Paranoid much? May 18, 2006
8 out of 14 found this review helpful
I was expecting a historical account of SIGINT, but what I found was on the verge of mysterious black helicopters and alien autopsies. I am not even half way through and I don't think I can finish it. Not only is some of the basic technical open source information inaccurate (try google), but a lot of his statements are suppositions or suspicions of an imaginative kid.
If you are looking for a book that has accurate historical information about signal reconnaissance, try: The Price of Vigilance : Attacks on American Surveillance Flights by Larry Tart and Robert Keefe ( I initially thought Chatter was by the same author, big mistake!)
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