The shadow factory: The ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on America

Image courtesy of Doubleday

This text traces the NSA’s integration of DPI appliances within key Internet infrastructure. Bamford first retells the September 11th terror attacks from the perspective of (failed) intelligence efforts. Ostensibly owing to these failures and combined with a need to support both international and national security and intelligence operations, the NSA began integrating DPI appliances into communications hubs throughout America. Bamford provides a raft of empirical data on DPI deployments, identifying key landing stations for undersea data cables that the NSA, in cooperation with major American ISPs, intercepts, and Internet exchange and peering buildings where data is siphoned into secret rooms, processed, then shuttled to NSA data centers. He also describes the specific equipment that was deployed in AT&T controlled peering locations and their capabilities and provides detailed overviews of the sordid and controversial histories of two of the NSA’s DPI vendors, Narus and Verint.

The book’s fourth section traces the fallout of the NSA’s surveillance program becoming public knowledge and sees Bamford argue that the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act has failed to supervise secretive government surveillance. He concludes by noting that the NSA is accelerating its operations, expanding server farms, increasing computer power, hiring foreign language specialists, and preparing the equivalent of “first-strike” capabilities in case of a “cyber-war.” DPI is far from the conclusion of the Agency’s cyber-ambitions. If there is a key failing to this book, it is that Bamford’s political attitudes seep throughout almost every page, forcing the reader to carefully evaluate the empirical data presented against potential biases in its documentation.

Bibliographic information:

Bamford, James. (2008). The shadow factory: The ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on America. New York: Doubleday.

If you’re interested in downloading Christopher Parsons’ full annotated bibliography about deep packet inspection, click here.

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About Christopher Parsons

Christopher is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. He is currently attending to a particular set of technologies that facilitate digitally mediated surveillance, including Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), behavioral advertising, and mobile devices. He thinks through how these technologies influence citizens in their decision to openly express themselves or engage in self-censoring behavior on a regular basis. He blogs at Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets and is @caparsons on Twitter.
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