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Loading... The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most…by James Bamford
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A bit dated, but a good read none-the-less. This book will satisfy nearly every cold-war espionage/covert enthusiast out there. (  ) improbus | Apr 10, 2007 |  James Bamford,JD, lives in Natick, Massachusetts. A Private attorney specializing in investigative reporting, when Bamford was 35 he wrote The Puzzle Palace (1982). This report on the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s “most secret agency” scooped virtually all the professional journalists who were satisfied to quietly ignore the agency with a larger budget and more personnel than all other security agencies combined. Back in the 1980's the electric bill alone at the headquarters was $31 million per year. 40 tons of shredded paper per day were trucked out of the headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, where 68,000 persons in various stages of cryptology worked. In 12/16/2005 Senator Arlen Spector, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, gave notice to Condoleeza Rice, former National Security Advisor for President Bush, and now Secretary of State, that his panel would hold hearings on NSA eavesdropping on people in the continental United States without warrants. It has become clear that Bamford’s dire predictions came true. ( ) keylawk | Mar 5, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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Being a super-secret spy agency and all, it's tough to get a handle on what's really going on at the NSA. However, James Bamford has done great work in documenting the agency's origins and Cold War exploits in The Puzzle Palace. Beginning with the earliest days of cryptography (code-making and code-breaking are large parts of the NSA's mission), Bamford explains how the agency's predecessors helped win World War II by breaking the German Enigma machine and defeating the Japanese Purple cipher. He also documents signals intelligence technology, ranging from the usual collection of spy satellites to a great big antenna in the West Virginia woods that listened to radio signals as they bounced back from the surface of the moon.
Bamford backs his serious historical and technical material (this is a carefully researched work of nonfiction) with warnings about how easily the NSA's technology could work against the democracies of the world. Bamford quotes U.S. Senator Frank Church: "If this government ever became a tyranny ... the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government ... is within the reach of the government to know." This is scary stuff. --David Wall
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400)
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