The Shadow Factory

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

By: James Bamford

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

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 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

interesting but not great

I arrived at "The Shadow Factory" by way of listening to Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon," a fictional work whose themes include cryptanalysis and the origins of the NSA. I was hoping to learn more about the NSA overall with "The Shadow Factory." The focus of Bamford's book is the post-9/11 era and it's primarily penned as an expose' of the NSA warrantless wiretapping rather than simply an informative work of nonfiction. The tone throughout is darkly conspiratorial and I suppose as readers/listeners we are expected to be totally outraged by what is revealed in the book, namely that the NSA is sweeping up vast oceans of bits and bytes for either immediate, real-time snooping with the aid of astoundingly fast computers, or for storage for future analysis. While this does raise some sticky points of a constitutional nature, I couldn't help but think that such massive intel gathering was vulnerable to equally massive intel spamming by our enemies. i.e. What is to prevent China, Iran, Russia et al from generating relentless streams of encrypted chaff to clog the NSA's vast but ultimately finite storage capacity? But I digress.

In short, if you're the sort of guy who likes espionage fiction, mathematics, computer science, cryptology and/or history you will probably find "The Shadow Factory" an interesting glimpse into the real deal, albeit filtered through the lens of a single author whose stance toward his subject is adversarial.

Every American needs to know what's in this book!

The IRS lost Lerner's emails? Why doesn't congress just get them from the NSA? They have stored every email sent in modern history - and they'll record and save this review.

America needs to wake up and realize that our elections mean nothing if all these bureaucratic entities, that report only to the president, can control us, while congress sits idly by and does nothing.

We The People need to decide if we're to be subjects, or citizens whose elected politicians report to us, and whose unelected bureaucrats report to us via congress.

Great Response

I really enjoyed this look at the NSA but I should warn buyers that it contains A LOT of information. It's not just spy stories. Bamford will go into excruciating detail about computer processing speeds, layouts of buildings, etc.

Good, but lacked central narrative

Covered quite a bit of ground on NSA policy and methods, only thing that would have improved it would be a stronger central narrative. The book seemed more like several disjointed encyclopedia entries.

tech terror

the NSA keeps us safe from terrorism, but if oir government ever fails and falls into the hands of a dictator, the technical prowess of the NSA and sister agencies will cause great terror. Hear this book.

Interesting Story/Insight, OK performance

Story is very interesting. Bamford has access to info / insights that are rare for an outsider of the Intel community (hmmm) and this book is put together fairly well.

The reader constantly mispronounces company names (like pronouncing Booz in Booz Allen like Bozo vs. Booze) also says some technical acronyms/terms in ways that are just off. Those things happened more than a handful of times and takes away from his overall decent performance.

Interesting, if scary, read

If you could sum up The Shadow Factory in three words, what would they be?

Total information awareness.

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

Any time they talked about how much data the NSA collects and stores.

What about Robertson Dean’s performance did you like?

He has a great voice with a consistent tone, easy reading style, and clear narration. He definitely mispronounces some technical terms a few times and spells out organization names that should just be said (DARPA for instance), but that didn't bug me much.

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

How hard wired the NSA is in to the world's communication networks. They're drilled down to the marrow of the systems, and I don't think they'd ever be removed.

Pass.

This book doesn't waste any time, nor pull any punches when it comes to getting its digs in on Bush. Enough already. We hear that in the news and from the current administration enough (it's Bush's fault).

If the author could have stuck more to factual information, instead of his political leanings, it would have been worth the credit.

Wasteful, mindless use of perceived threats to undermine America while protecting her

Detailed description of the conflict between self preservation through highly skilled, disciplined, and ethical administration and the lawless application there of. A disturbing tale that is necessarily a hard read. In many cases a disturbing book.

Better than fiction.

loved this audio book. narration was great. will listen again and recommended this audio book