OOPS, NEVERMIND:

The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: a review of THE SHADOW FACTORY: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America By James Bamford (CHRISTOPHER DICKEY, NY Times Book Review)

[T]o follow the central argument of the book about just why and how United States government eavesdropping has become so pervasive and invasive, one has to know that a vast majority of the world’s communications are now transmitted over ­fiber-optic cables. In 1988 they carried only 2 percent of international traffic, but by 2000 they carried 80 percent. When micro­wave transmissions and communications satellites were the medium, messages were relatively easy for the N.S.A. to intercept, en masse and through the open air. But to catch the ever-growing flood of digital data in the bundled strands of fiber that crisscross the planet — voice calls, e-mail, faxes, videos and so much more — you have to tap into the cables directly. Or, better still, you can set up a monitoring operation at the switch, where many different cables come together. Once you have a facility to split off the signals without interrupting them, you’re plugged in to a mother lode of megabytes — millions going by every few seconds. Mumbai, as it happens, has the central switch for much of Asia and virtually all the cables of the Middle East.

For the moment, at least, the most important switches of all are in the United States, which is still the center of the digital communications universe. Today, even phone calls between neighbors on the far side of the world are broken up into packets that may wind up crossing American territory, albeit at the speed of light, before they get down the block in, say, Baghdad. Before 9/11, the N.S.A. tried with only very limited success to tap into the United States switches. But in the weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the head of the N.S.A., , “succeeded in gaining the cooperation of nearly all of the nation’s telecommunications giants,” according to Bamford. Could those switches and cables being tapped in the United States be called wires? Yes indeed. And was this being done without warrants? Yes, again. But “warrantless wiretapping” — that phrase connoting scandalous disrespect for American laws and freedoms — doesn’t begin to describe the staggering volume of raw information the cables put at the N.S.A.’s disposal.

The process is the opposite of what “wiretapping” used to mean in the popular imagination: alligator clips on a single wire that got you exactly the phone line you wanted to monitor. The N.S.A.’s approach in effect intercepted just about all communications, then used sophisticated computers and software to sift through the material. And, as with conventional warfare, these big-ticket spying operations were contracted to private companies that put former government employees on their payrolls — what Bamford calls “the ­surveillance-industrial complex.”

Is all this really necessary to fight the terrorist threat that actually exists? Is it really useful to accumulate watch lists that have half a million names on them? The administration’s core argument, including and especially after The New York Times broke the story of the warrantless program in 2005, is that it is vital to prevent another 9/11. But in a ferocious, detailed attack on Hayden (who is now the director of the Central Intelligence Agency), Bamford argues that the N.S.A. in 2000 and 2001 had not only the means, but also the actual information necessary to prevent the attacks on New York and Washington. The agency had been monitoring communications out of an Al Qaeda command center in Yemen, and those had pointed squarely to the presence of two key plotters in California. Yet Hayden at that moment didn’t want to risk any semblance of monitoring people in the United States...

Am I misreading this, or didn't he just undercut his entire preceding argument?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 10, 2009 9:32 AM