SFChronicle: Interview With NSA Expert James Bamford
The investigative journalist, who served in the Navy and attended law school in his native Boston, has the distinction of having written the first book about the NSA: “The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency. A former distinguished visiting professor at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, Bamford now lives in Washington, D.C., and London.
James Bamford has written four books about the NSA.
James Bamford: “The NSA has no constitutional right to secretly obtain the telephone records of every American citizen on a daily basis, subject them to sophisticated data mining and store them forever.”
Since that 1982 best seller, Bamford has written three more books that delve into the NSA: “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency” (2001); “A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies” (2004); and “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret N.S.A. From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America” (2008).
Q: What has changed the most about the NSA since your last book, “The Shadow Factory,” came out in 2008?
A: The agency has expanded enormously, in terms of size, power and invasiveness since “The Shadow Factory” was published. As I wrote in my Wired magazine cover story last year, the agency has been going on a massive building spree, expanding eavesdropping locations around the world, including one for 4,000 intercept operators at its facility near Augusta, Ga. In addition, it is in the process of building a gigantic one million square-foot surveillance center in Utah where it will store billions of records, phone calls, email and Google searches, many of them involving Americans.