The Shadow Factory

The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

By: James Bamford

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Today’s National Security Agency is the largest, most costly, and most technologically advanced spy organization the world has ever known. It is also the most intrusive, secretly filtering millions of phone calls and e-mails an hour in the United States and around the world. Half a million people live on its watch list, and the number grows by the thousands every month. Has America become a surveillance state?
In The Shadow Factory, James Bamford, the foremost expert on the National Security Agency, charts its transformation since 9/11, as the legendary code breakers turned their ears away from outside enemies, such as the Soviet Union, and inward to enemies whose communications increasingly crisscross America.
Fast-paced and riveting, The Shadow Factory is about a world unseen by Americans without the highest security clearances. But it is a world in which even their most intimate whispers may no longer be private.©2008 James Bamford; (P)2008 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

A Washington Post Notable Book

“Important and disturbing. . . . This revealing and provocative book is necessary reading . . . Bamford goes where the 9/11 Commission did not fully go.”
—Senator Bob Kerrey, The Washington Post Book World

“Fascinating. . . . Bamford has distilled a troubling chapter in American history.”
—Bloomberg News

“At its core and at its best, Bamford’s book is a schematic diagram tracing the obsessions and excesses of the Bush administration after 9/11. . . . There have been glimpses inside the NSA before, but until now no one has published a comprehensive and detailed report on the agency. . . . Bamford has emerged with everything except the combination to the director’s safe.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Engaging. . . . Chilling. . . . Bamford is able to link disparate facts and paint a picture of utter, compounded failure—failure to find the NSA’s terrorist targets and failure to protect American citizens’ communications from becoming tangled in a dragnet.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle

“The bad news in Bamford’s fascinating new study of the NSA is that Big Brother really is watching. The worse news . . . is that Big Brother often listens in on the wrong people and sometimes fails to recognize critical information. . . . Bamford convincingly argues that the agency . . . broke the law and spied on Americans and nearly got away with it.”
—The Baltimore Sun

Great book for those interested in cyber-warfare

This is a great book for those interested in information security and cyber-warfare. The narrator is easy on the ears but does pronounce some of tech jargon wrong at times. I did find the section about the hearings boring but relevant to the story. Some of the topics seem to meander off but are quickly tied back in later to how the NSA works and deals with issues. Great insight on the hiring practices.

the Shadow Factory?

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

eveyone in america need to read this book.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Shadow Factory?

how the government can bend the constutition / laws and still screw everything up. if this book is 1/2 true we the people are the ones screwed. gun conrol will never work if these people are in control.

Which scene was your favorite?

how tax payer dollars are used to do nothing.

What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?

every page

Any additional comments?

after read this where do we hide? after also reading "Below Eagles" by Vick Fallon I have little to expect from any government.

Great insight on a very secretive agency and culture

Great insight on a very secretive agency and her inner workings, in many ways knowing they capabilities gives one an Orwellian feeling that big brother is watching every sound, every whisper and soon very soon our thinking.

Intersection of national security and big data.

By chance, I read this book and In the Plex (a Google biography) one after the other. It made for an interesting side-by-side. Both have massive data storage facilities and, in their different ways, brilliantly make sense of mountains of data. Both kinda creep us out. When I type “what sound does a g…,” google auto fills “giraffe make” – nailing what I was going to query. And when the NSA snags a 6 second audio clip of a most wanted terrorist in a jeep in a remote part of the desert thousands of miles away, Bamford tells us how the NSA/CIA not only IDs him, but destroys his jeep with a hellfire missile within 40 minutes.

The first quarter of the book pre-dates NSA’s big data days. It details the 9/11 hijacker’s movements within the United States just prior to the attack, while telling the parallel story of NSA’s intelligence gathering and communication failures with the FBI/CIA.

The second part of the book deals with NSA’s growth post-9/11 and its gathering of massive amounts of data on citizens and non-citizens. Politics aside, I was interested in the nuts and bolts of how the NSA captures the data.

The third part explores NSA’s growing reliance on government contractors, including several Israeli ex-military types that apparently concern James Bamford.

I’m trying to make sense of the big data world we find ourselves in and the commercial and government titans who are figuring out how to wield it. This book was a helpful piece of the puzzle.

Ehhhh

I bit of a rambling history of the NSA with an obvious bias. Too often the author deviates from a "just the facts ma'am" approach to provide his own editorial. It was informative, but could have been an hour shorter easy.