The Shadow Factory Also by James Bamford
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This book has been optimized for viewing at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels. THE SHADOW FACTORY ALSO BY JAMES BAMFORD A Pretext for War Body of Secrets The Puzzle Palace ■ ■ THE SHADOW FACTORY ■ The Ultra-Secret NSA from9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America JAMES BAMFORD DOUBLEDAY New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland ■ ■ Copyright © 2008 by James Bamford All Rights Reserved Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.doubleday.com DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark and the DD colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. Book design by Michael Collica Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bamford, James. The shadow factory : the ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on America / James Bamford. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. United States. National Security Agency—History. 2. Intelligence service—United States. 3. Electronic surveillance—United States. 4. United States—Politics and government—2001– I. Title. UB256.U6B38 2008 327.1273—dc22 2008026448 eISBN: 978-0-385-52839 -9 v1.0 To Mary Ann And to my father, Vincent In memory of my mother, Katherine And to Tom, Paula, and Christina I’m very grateful for their constant support and encouragement. Contents Acknowledgments .......................... xi Introduction ................................. 1 BOOK ONE: ATTACK Sanaa ...................................... 7 Intercept ................................... 12 San Diego ................................. 22 Deaf ...................................... 27 Mesa ...................................... 39 Thinthread ................................. 44 Totowa .................................... 48 Chatter .................................... 55 Cambrils................................... 58 Warning ................................... 63 Fort Lee ................................... 70 vii CONTENTS Discovery .................................. 74 Laurel ..................................... 76 Surprise ................................... 82 Pentagon .................................. 89 BOOK TWO: TARGETS Opportunity ................................ 99 Hunters................................... 105 FISA ..................................... 112 Mission................................... 119 Highlander ................................ 124 Assassination ............................. 135 War ...................................... 143 BOOK THREE: COOPERATION Shamrock................................. 161 Qwest .................................... 169 Cables.................................... 175 Splitter ................................... 188 Industry .................................. 197 Transit ................................... 207 Partners .................................. 212 Wiretappers ............................... 234 viii CONTENTS Technotyranny ............................ 254 Miners ................................... 262 BOOK FOUR: DISCOVERY Fractures ................................. 271 Emergency ................................ 278 Exposure ................................. 287 Extremis.................................. 293 Immunity ................................. 301 BOOK FIVE: FUTURE Exabytes.................................. 311 Trailblazer ................................ 325 Turbulence ................................ 331 Abyss .................................... 341 Notes..................................... 347 Index ..................................... 379 ix Acknowledgments Whenever I write about the NSA, it is like trying to reassemble a puzzle after the pieces have been scrambled. Thus, I am deeply grateful to the many courageous people who helped me fit the pieces together. Although they must be unnamed, they will not go unheard or unthanked. I am also very grateful to Doubleday’s editor-in-chief, Bill Thomas, for suggesting this book and for his help, encouragement, and friendship. Many thanks also to my editor, Kris Puopolo, who helped me put the pieces of the puzzle in their proper places and was always full of good ideas and support. And thanks to Stephanie Bowen for her excellent eye and help with managing the manuscript and for keeping me on schedule. I also greatly appreciate the years of excellent advice and direction pro- vided by Kris Dahl, my agent at International Creative Management. THE SHADOW FACTORY Introduction n northern Georgia near the South Carolina border, a few miles from ILeburda’s Grits N’ Gravy and the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, one of the most secret facilities in the world is undergoing a major ex- pansion. When completed, it will likely be the largest eavesdropping facility ever created, employing more than four thousand civilian and military “voice interceptors” and other specialists. Run by the ultra-se- cret National Security Agency, it is where the agency eavesdrops on the Middle East and North Africa, thousands of miles away. Inside, behind barbed-wire fences, heavily armed guards, and cipher-locked doors, earphone-clad men and women secretly listen in as al-Qaeda members chat on cell phones along the Afghan border, and to insurgents plan- ning attacks in Iraq. They also target and record American citizens in that region, including businesspeople, journalists, and Red Cross work- ers, as they engage in intimate conversations with their spouses back home and discuss confidential matters and business deals. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” said one of the NSA intercept operators who listened in on the Americans, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations . Basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” By 2008, the NSA had become the largest, most costly, and most tech- nologically sophisticated spy organization the world has ever known. It had also become the most intrusive, secretly filtering millions of phone 1 INTRODUCTION calls and e-mails an hour—international and domestic—through equip- ment programmed to watch and listen for hundreds of thousands of names and phone numbers. To sift through it all, the agency has the world’s largest collection of data-eating supercomputers. Its newest, code-named “Black Widow,” is a colossal $17.5 million Cray computer made up of sixteen tall cabinets crammed with thousands of processors. It is able to achieve speeds of hundreds of teraflops—hundreds of trillions of opera- tions a second—and the NSA predicts that it will soon break the petaflop barrier, plowing through phone calls, e-mails, and other data at more than a quadrillion operations a second. In its manic drive for information, the agency requires a city-sized headquarters complex that consumes so much energy that it is now in real danger of running out of power and going dark. It has already run out of space to store all of its data—data in which it is now drowning, ac- cording to the Congressional Research Service. “Whereas some observ- ers once predicted that the NSA was in danger of becoming proverbially deaf due to the spreading use of encrypted communications,” the report said, “it appears that NSA may now be at greater risk of being ‘drowned’ in information.” The report added, “Some intelligence data sources grow at a rate of four petabytes per month now . and the rate of growth is increasing.” In a year at that rate, the NSA’s massive database would hold at least 48 petabytes, the equivalent of nearly one billion four-door filing cabinets full of documents. It would also be equal to about twenty-four trillion pages of text. Among the few who know just how much data flows into the NSA is Eric C. Haseltine. The former head of Disney’s “Imagineering” labs, Haseltine was appointed as the agency’s associate director for research in 2002. Two years later he noted that even the NSA’s enormous com- puter power has trouble keeping up with the flow. “We in the NSA are encountering problems with the flood of information that people [in the outside world] won’t see for a generation or two,” he said. “We’ve been into the future and we’ve seen the problems” of a “tidal wave” of data. He added, “We can either be drowned by it or we can get on our surf- board and surf it and let it propel us. And, of course, that’s what we’re trying to do.” If indeed the data flowing into the NSA is what the outside world will 2 INTRODUCTION see two to four decades from now, the amount of information the agency is ingesting is truly astronomical. In fact, it may be rapidly moving from measuring the data by the petabyte to measuring it by the exabyte, which is 1,000 petabytes. By way of perspective, 200 petabytes is the equivalent of all printed material. Five exabytes (5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes), on the other hand, represents enough information to fill 37,000 new Li- braries of Congress and more than all the words ever printed. This is the annual equivalent of a thirty-foot stack of books for every man, woman, and child on the planet. No longer able to store all the intercepted phone calls and e-mail in its secret city, the agency has now built a new data warehouse in San Antonio, Texas. Costing, with renovations, upwards of $130 million, the 470,000-square-foot facility will be almost the size of the Alamodome. Considering how much data can now be squeezed onto a small flash drive, the new NSA building may eventually be able to hold all the information in the world. The principal end product of all that data and all that processing