Super Spy

...The reader learns, for instance, about the close collaboration between NSA and the corresponding Government Communications Headquarters in England...

...The recitation of innumerable structural changes in U.S...

...11 The FBI and CIA have provided NSA watch lists of citizens they have suspected of "subversion," including antiwar and civil rights activists...

...When a paranoid Administration such as Richard Nixon's sent the NSA a "watch list" (read "enemies list") to keep track of citizens who might have been thinking unapproved thoughts, the agency appeared to be eager to help out...

...H On December 4, 1981, President Reagan signed an executive order scrapping President Carter's restraints on domestic spying...

...After reading The Puzzle Palace, I believed there was, indeed, a case to be made for intercepting the microwave and satellite messages of world leaders who are out to do the United States no good—not a purist's case, I admit, but a pragmatic one...

...The ability to monitor compliance with the SALT I and II agreements by checking on Soviet military communications and telemetry signals from Soviet missiles would seem to be essential...

...What is not generally known is that the agency gathers information on all our foreign friends as well...

...In 1977, he says, NSA had a budget estimated at $10 billion...

...H NSA eavesdrops on international satellite traffic, using key words in a computer to pick up "dangerous" messages in telexes and cablegrams, and monitors by ear conversations involving "targeted" phone numbers...

...With that in mind, Bamford's book is morbidly fascinating...

...Bamford's examples of NSA practices, taken from official hearings following Watergate and from interviews with former NSA employees, show clear threats to individual liberty: U NSA reads all private messages sent by international carriers...

...Bamford's enormously detailed research compels us to be concerned about the NSA's influence on our lives...

...Unfortunately, the prevailing wisdom sanctions these intrusions on our liberties: I On November 6, 1982, a Federal appeals court ruled that NSA has the legal right to intercept communications between U.S...

...But there is not a great deal of analysis in the book...

...Most people who know about the NSA think the agency performs a necessary function by intercepting the electronic communications of potential foreign enemies, breaking their codes and cyphers, and keeping the American public alerted to dangerous situations...

...In the end, however, these problems are secondary to the valuable contents of the book- —John Wicklein (John Wicklein is the author of "Electronic Nightmare: The New Communications and Freedom...

...The title is taken from the nickname of NSA's huge headquarters, a city of some 50,000 workers spread over a thousand acres at Fort George G. Meade, halfway between Washington and Baltimore...

...And yet it is an intelligence agency far larger and far more powerful than the CIA—its budget is said to be bigger than the combined budgets of the FBI and CIA...

...In the wake of Watergate, which revealed extensive domestic surveillance by the Nixon Administration, Congress in 1978 enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act...

...The NSA, part of the Defense Department, is a supersecret agency that intends to stay that way...

...Bamford's book is encyclopedic in its reporting on the agency's communications intelligence operations...

...The idea was to bring some rule of law to the FBI-NSA data collection collaboration, and put some restraints on warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA and the CIA...

...In a dirty world, the knowledge of what "the other side" is thinking can, if cautiously evaluated and applied, be helpful in preserving peace...

...Coming away from the book, I could find no justification for the agency's interception of the telephone calls of private individuals about whom the agency has no reason to be suspicious, on whom no judge has ruled that a specific tap is necessary or justified...

...citizens and people overseas and provide summaries of those messages to the FBI...

...they should be spelled out or cut in any revised edition...

...But there is, of course, the dark side of NSA operations...

...Bamford calls it "the largest single espionage factory in the free world...

...The CIA's incompetence and indifference to democratic practice have been brought to light in various Congressional hearings and, as a result, some of its more egregious practices have been limited by legislation...

...intelligence agencies since 1912 is also tedious and could be pruned...

...Still, the hundreds of acronyms and initials for agencies and successor agencies are confusing...

...The Reagan order, according to Bamford, is "designed more to protect the intelligence community from the citizen than the citizen from the [intelligence gathering] agencies...

...Furthermore, I would delete the cliches, such as, "Whatever the reason, the Arab codebreaker shipped off to Moscow and in so doing inflicted another body blow to the already black-and-blue Agency...

...Bamford notes that William O. Baker, former head of AT&T's Bell Laboratories, has served on the secret NSA Scientific Advisory Board, and was probably influential in giving the agency the technical knowhow to eavesdrop on a nationwide phone system he himself had helped develop...

...NSA, unrestricted by law, can be of enormous help to authoritarians within our own government...

...The relationship explains why the discovery that Geoffrey Arthur Prime had been a Soviet spy in the British headquarters caused consternation in the puzzle palace...

...Even more disturbing, the NSA gathers information on most Americans...

...Intercepted messages are routinely turned over to other Government agencies, such as the FBI and the CIA, for use in tracking down who knows what violations of orthodoxy disapproved of by the administration in power...

...But the legislation, as Bamford points out, has enough loopholes in its fine print to allow NSA to go about its domestic surveillance business almost unhindered...

...That includes most of our telephone calls...

...Domestic surveillance is in again...

...The reason lawmakers usually give to justify such violations of our constitutional rights is "national security," the same rationale used to justify surveillance and repression of citizens in the Soviet Union, El Salvador, Chile, South Korea, and other dictatorial regimes that do not want their authority challenged...

...perhaps Bamford believed that giving us the facts would be enough to key our own assessment of the NSA's practices, and he may be right...

...All this becomes clear from the exhaustive documentation James Bamford presents in The Puzzle Palace...

...f NSA computers and human operatives monitor domestic phone calls originating from AT&T microwave relays...

...But the National Security Agency (NSA), accountable neither to Congress nor to the public, is another story...

...Within the United States," Bamford asserts, "the NSA is still free to pull into its massive vacuum cleaner every telephone call and message entering, leaving, or transiting the country, as long as it is done by microwave interception...