Saturday, November 1, 2008

POW: James Bamford

C-Span's Book TV has a podcast interview of James Banford, author of "Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America". This book broke the story about how the NSA listened to phone sex between soldiers in Iraq and their spouses at home.

Bamford says some bad things about General Hayden, then head of the NSA and now DCI.

Food for thought
: The NSA now and in the future is going to regularly confront messy issues over when and who they can eavesdrop on. Given that fact, wouldn't it make sense for the agency head to have some experience with the legal framework covering domestic surveillance? That is opposed to someone experienced with surveillance in foreign countries, where such activities are necessarily outside the law. Put another way, if you want a legal domestic surveillance product then you might look for someone who knows how to do legal domestic surveillance. Just saying...

The other thing I'd want to remember- Bamford's sources describe targeting people for assassination based on intercepted conversations in languages they don't even understand. Death by Bureaucracy!