Blind Trust No Longer

Exploring the policies of the NSA

The Shadow Factor: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by James Bamford, Doubleday, 2008. $27.95, 416 pg.
George W. Bush, in his acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention, assured Americans that he would honor their trust. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, he asked a shocked populace to extend even more of that trust to him so that he could wage the war on terrorism. In that spirit, members of Congress gave the government all the power Bush believed necessary when they amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; the amendments ensured that the National Security Agency had broad leeway to wiretap suspected terrorists. Congress reasoned that the revision of the law would allow for more effective electronic surveillance, one of the key tools in America’s fight against terrorism.
However, according to a new book, the NSA assumed the power that the American people had, with Bush’s authorization, vested in it, and went on to needlessly break the law. The agency violated the public’s trust by wiretapping Americans without required warrants and denying the right to privacy in many cases in which it should have been guaranteed. Some of the recent activities of the NSA seem to be something out of a George Orwell novel. In The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, journalist and intelligence expert James Bamford reveals how the NSA’s policies changed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and how the agency’s actions since then have disillusioned so many.
A Do Nothing Policy
For most Americans, it was inconceivable prior to Sept. 11 that the United States would be attacked in the manner, and on the scale, that it was. Americans believed in the government’s ability to protect them, a belief expressed most eloquently and simply by the lack of attention generally paid to national security. The first section of The Shadow Factory criticizes the pre-9/11 activity of the NSA, which let interagency rivalry and the fear of spying on Americans prevent it from doing its assigned task of ensuring national security. Upset with the CIA for “treating them not as equals, but as subordinates,” NSA officials neglected to pass important information to the CIA and follow up leads. Bamford reveals that before the 9/11 attacks, the NSA had been eavesdropping for months on suspected terrorist calls to Yemen. Yet the agency, according to Bamford, “never made the effort” to trace where the calls originated: “If the NSA had traced any of the incoming calls to the [Yemen] ops center, they would have located two of the callers on California soil” and perhaps prevented the Sept. 11 attacks.
Big Brother is Listening
After terrorism hit the World Trade Center and Washington, D.C., the NSA put its days of petty inaction behind it. Indeed, the agency shifted its policy to the other extreme and began encroaching on American civil liberties. It was a moment of rare political unity, and no one wanted to risk being labeled as soft on terrorism. Citizens, including Bamford himself, were blind to a possible breach of trust. In 2001, he had said that he didn’t think the NSA would “eavesdrop illegally on Americans.” So in 2005, when The New York Times broke the story of the NSA’s domestic surveillance, he was shocked to learn the opposite.
In his book, Bamford reveals that the warrantless wiretapping program had NSA staff listening in on “incredibly intimate and personal conversations between Americans” and installing telecom taps that can copy most of America’s e-mail traffic. Bamford believes that this program was illegal and unnecessary because pre-9/11 intelligence failures in pursuing al-Qaeda were results of incompetence, not legal restrictions. This post-9/11 lifting of restrictions also resulted in the NSA drowning “in useless data” because everyone’s words and actions were screened by surveillance machines.
Extraordinary Times
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the years of warrantless wiretapping, Americans today no longer have such blind faith in government. While national security is a paramount concern, the political will for ever-increasing surveillance from agencies such as the NSA seems to have faded, though there is certainly no rush among the political class to prosecute the abuses Bamford describes. The prominence of Bamford’s book demonstrates that the debate over surveillance may be losing some of its post-9/11 hysteria and returning more to the norm of American civil liberties discourse.