CYBERWAR: Inside the NSA’s Largest and Most Expansive Secret Domestic Spy Center

AMY GOODMAN: In addition, the NSA has also created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. James Bamford writes the secret surveillance program "is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration," but later killed by Congress in 2003 due to privacy concerns and public outcry.

James Bamford joins us now from London, England. His article in Wired is called "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)." Jim Bamford is an investigative journalist who’s been covering the National Security Agency for the last three decades. He came close to standing trial after revealing the NSA’s operations in an explosive 1982 book called The Puzzle Palace. His latest book is the last in his trilogy on the NSA; it’s called The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.


James Bamford, welcome to Democracy Now! Your piece is so dramatic. I was wondering if you might read the first few paragraphs as we begin.

JAMES BAMFORD: I’ll give it a try.

“The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as 'the principle,' marriage to multiple wives.

“Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town. ................(more)