TV Program Description
Original PBS Broadcast Date: February 3, 2009
In this program, an eye-opening documentary on the National
Security Agency (NSA) by best-selling author James Bamford and
Emmy Award-winning producer Scott Willis, NOVA exposes the
ultra-secret intelligence agency's role in the failure to stop
the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent eavesdropping program that
listens in without warrant on millions of American citizens.
"The Spy Factory" is based on Bamford's best-selling 2008
book, The Shadow Factory, praised as "important and
disturbing" in the Washington Post by former senator
Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission. (Read our
excerpt.)
In this program, NOVA chronicles the NSA's role in
eavesdropping both before and after 9/11. Drawing on dozens of
interviews with agency insiders and probing publicly available
sources as well as transcripts of terrorist trials and an FBI
chronology of the terrorists' movements, NOVA assembles a
detailed picture of events leading up to the 9/11 attacks.
The program sheds light on the vital data known inside the NSA
but only partly relayed to other agencies. The trove of
information the NSA had access to in advance included Osama
bin Laden's now-disconnected direct satellite phone, which the
NSA tapped starting in 1996. Exclusive footage shows the
three-story house in Yemen that served as Al Qaeda's
communications and logistics headquarters. The NSA was
listening in on phone communications to and from the house for
years prior to the 9/11 attack.
Three times the size of the CIA and far more secret, the NSA
is comprised of top linguists, mathematicians, and
technologists trained to decipher all kinds of
communications—epitomizing the hidden world of
high-tech, 21st-century surveillance. To show how this
eavesdropping operates, NOVA follows the trail of just one
typical e-mail sent from Asia to the U.S. Streaming as pulses
of light into a fiber-optic cable, it travels across the
Pacific Ocean, coming ashore in California, and finally
reaching an AT&T facility in San Francisco, where the cable is
split and the data sent to a secret NSA monitoring room on the
floor below. This enables the NSA to intercept not only most
Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal
Internet traffic.
Thus, since 9/11, the agency has turned its giant ear inward
to monitor the communications of ordinary Americans, many of
whom are on the government's secret watch list, now more than
half-a-million names long.
But how effective is this monumental monitoring effort in
countering security threats? The NSA is faced with an enormous
and ever-expanding archive of phone calls and e-mail messages.
Many experts in data mining and analysis are skeptical about
the value of collecting so much information without the
ability to understand it, as it may lead to critical clues
being lost in the static. (Listen to a
podcast
about the challenge even powerful computers have in decoding
human speech.)
Among those interviewed on "The Spy Factory" are former NSA,
CIA, and FBI analysts and officials, many speaking publicly
for the first time. Among these is Mark Rossini, the senior
FBI agent in the CIA's Osama bin Laden tracking unit. For the
first time, Rossini tells how intelligence agency turf wars
prevented him from notifying his FBI superiors that Al Qaeda
terrorists were heading for the U.S. with valid visas in early
2000.
Surprisingly, the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into
the NSA's role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the
World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they
would have understood the full extent to which the agency had
major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or
disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and FBI.
Traditionally, the NSA didn't share its raw data with those
other agencies, an institutionalized reluctance that played a
critical role in the failure to stop the 9/11 plotters. (Hear
from
Eleanor Hill, a
former Staff Director of the House Intelligence Committee, on
the myriad dangers inherent in such a tradition.)
In what Bamford calls "one of the largest ironies in the
history of American intelligence," he notes that weeks before
the attacks, the terrorists were staying in a hotel near NSA
headquarters in Maryland, almost within sight of the office of
then-NSA Director Michael Hayden. Hayden, who was later
appointed director of the CIA by President Bush, was never
held accountable for his agency's failure, and after 9/11 he
spearheaded the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping
activities in the name of making the nation safe from
terrorists.
Addressing the question,
Are we any safer now than we were before?, Bamford
says, "We should have been safe the way it was. NSA had all
the information that it needed to stop the 9/11 hijackers. It
had laws that allowed it to track the hijackers." Bamford adds
that those same laws also protected the privacy of ordinary
Americans in ways that have since vanished. (On this website,
Bamford answers
viewer questions
about the NSA and other organizations and issues covered in
the program.)
Program Transcript
Program Credits
