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 enlarge | Author: James Bamford
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $15.34
You Save: $12.61 (45%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 8491
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0385521324
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.1273
EAN: 9780385521321
ASIN: 0385521324
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Interesting read November 30, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is definitely an interesting read with quite a few shocking facts, at least for me. I wans't aware as to the depth of the eavesdropping program and it was therefore shocking to find to which extend this program invades the privacy of all of us.
While the subject is captivating enough, the writer failed to captivate me. From my perspective this book could have been better written, thereby delivering a stronger message to a possibly bigger audience.
 Bamford does it again November 29, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Bamford does an amazing job of taking very complicated issues and making them understandable. As a historian of intelligenc I can appreciate the work and dedication it took to bring this out. Every citizen of the US and the World should read this book, If you value freedom and the Constitution read it now.
 Bamford omits any semblance of context November 28, 2008
2 out of 8 found this review helpful
Bamford is an entertaining writer.
But his book lacks context.
One of the issues that prevented NSA from communicating its concerns about the upcoming 9/11 attacks were the deliberate political and legal "walls" of separation that prevented various bureaucracies from communicating and from taking effective action.
For another ... for years, people in the NYC area were entertained by local newspaper accounts of Soviet electronic evesdropping being carried out right under our noses. Most likely people outside the local area had no idea. But the local papers described how, for example, a high-rise building for the Soviet consulate was constructed on high ground in the northern end of Manhattan that would "vacuum" up the microwave transmissions from the top of the Empire State Building. Added to that was a "summer residence" out on Long Island that allowed the Soviets to do electronic evesdropping on the Grumman factory that made the Navy AWACS type of aircraft, the E-2C.
A "fun activity" in New York used to be hunting "spy houses" of foreign countries. As I recall, there was a "suspicious" warehouse on the West Side of Manhattan around 40th Street & 12th Avenue ... suspicious because of the huge antenna farm on the roof. The little brass plaque indicated that the building belonged to the Peoples Republic of China.
There also were rumors of buildings with strange antennas that belonged to Japanese and British "interests". 30 Rock [Rockefeller Center] was headquarters of the British intelligence services for decades [and may still be].
There are persistent reports of daily cyber attacks against the Pentagon and other U.S. government facilities and computer centers.
And these are just what gets into the public eye. At a public presentation he gave some years ago, the FBI's director in New York stated that their primary mission was counter-espionage.
So before the NSA gets singled out as the bad guy on the planet, take a look at what the U.S. needs to do to defend itself against electronic attacks and electronic and other intelligence penetrations.
The NSA is limited by various laws, for example. But there are no laws and no ACLU and no teams of lawyers that go after any foreign countries that build communications monitoring facilities within the United States. There is nothing to stop China or Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or Russia from stuffing a warehouse in North Carolina (or anywhere else in the United States) with evesdroppng equipment and doing exactly the same sort of things being allegedly being done by NSA.
There is some unclassified information available by surfing the net. But you need to dig it out. Most of the unclassified stuff is pretty old, unfortunately.
If you can get to Laurel, Maryland, the NSA has a museum that is open to the public ... the National Cryptologic Museum. It has some interesting exhibits. Visit www.nsa.gov for details on hours and a map of how to find the place. There is also the Center for Cryptologic History, at http://www.nsa.gov/cch/index.cfm and they have a lot of free stuff they can send you. Some of the material is available for free at the museum.
For just a hint of what has gone on in the past, do a Google search for "venona". Books on that activity are still being written and are available on Amazon.
The point is that the world is a dangerous place and while a bureaucracy like NSA may not always be 100% on the mark, if it didn't exist, we would have to invent it.
Bamford's Shadow Factory November 23, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Bamford does a credible job of presenting his view of the facts. He does make some mistakes in context and technical language that call into question his interpretations. It's well presented and overall, believable.
 This will make the paranoid happy. November 16, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Yesterday I concluded a week of disturbing sleep by wrapping up reading this book.
I also sent money to the ACLU and the EFF, since both orgs are still pursuing the warrantless wiretapping business. Having read this, I felt pretty compelled to contribute to both orgs.
If the knowledge that your every email, phone call, and IM is being captured and data-mined, you won't want to read this. The only comfort I found in the book is learning that, according to the writer, Google execs were brainstorming years ago about the possibility that they would be bullied by some agency into sharing user data and were thinking up ways to manipulate their own data to keep it useful for their purposes and useless to anybody else.
At times, the level of detail in the book gets excessive. There's nothing wrong with skimreading a few pages till the author steps back a level and moves on with making a point.
This wasn't a fun read but I'm glad I spent the time getting through it. I learned a lot.
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