The Shadow Factory Quotes

“Like a black hole, NSA pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to escape.”
― James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss—the abyss from which there is no return.”
― James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

“We knew that some guys that looked as though they were al-Qaeda-associated were traveling to KL,” said a senior CIA official, referring to Kuala Lumpur. “We didn’t know what they were going to do there. We were trying to find that. And we were concerned that there might be an attack, because it wasn’t just Mihdhar and Hazmi, it was also ‘eleven young guys’—which was a term that was used for operatives traveling. We didn’t have the names of the others, and on Hazmi we only had his first name, ‘Nawaf.’ So the concern was: What are they doing? Is this a prelude to an attack in KL—what’s happening here?”
― James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

“Although tapping into underground fiber-optic lines is much more difficult than tapping into a copper cable, the technique has been perfected by the NSA. For cables buried in foreign countries, the task of gaining access to them was given to a unique covert organization named the Special Collection Service (SCS), which combined the clandestine skills of the CIA with the technical capabilities of the NSA. Its purpose is to put sophisticated eavesdropping equipment—from bugs to parabolic antennas—in difficult-to-reach places. It also attempts to target for recruitment key foreign communications personnel, such as database managers, systems administrators, and IT specialists. The”
― James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

“On a bench in Essex’s lab was a 10-teraflop processor about the size of a standard desktop. It ran, however, about ten thousand times faster, at ten trillion operations a second. “We’ve developed a very sophisticated test called the ‘holy shit test,’” said Moodispaw. “One day we had three different sets of government customers come in to see what we could do. They all said, ‘Holy shit, you can do that?’ We’re getting results nobody else can on the technology side.” Eavesdropping”
― James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America