James Bamford is the chronicler of the National Security Agency, the outfit with 10-100 (who knows?) times the budget of the CIA; the agency whose founding legislation was itself classified back in the 1950s. I’ve grown beyond thinking sigint was bad, but the watcher must be watched. And it takes courage to do it, in real life year after year. The guy who does it is Bamford.
He is a bit of hero of mine, a man whose hand I am proud to have shaken. The review of his latest book, starts with the quotation “Probably the best place within the entire region to install a listening post is the Indian city of Mumbai.”
Why would Mumbai be such a valuable listening post for the N.S.A.? To understand the answer, and indeed to follow the central argument of the book about just why and how United States government eavesdropping has become so pervasive and invasive, one has to know that a vast majority of the world’s communications are now transmitted over fiber-optic cables. In 1988 they carried only 2 percent of international traffic, but by 2000 they carried 80 percent. When microwave transmissions and communications satellites were the medium, messages were relatively easy for the N.S.A. to intercept, en masse and through the open air. But to catch the ever-growing flood of digital data in the bundled strands of fiber that crisscross the planet — voice calls, e-mail, faxes, videos and so much more — you have to tap into the cables directly. Or, better still, you can set up a monitoring operation at the switch, where many different cables come together. Once you have a facility to split off the signals without interrupting them, you’re plugged in to a mother lode of megabytes — millions going by every few seconds. Mumbai, as it happens, has the central switch for much of Asia and virtually all the cables of the Middle East.
And for those who like their conspiracy theories well done, here are the final sentences:
Bamford’s sources from India’s intelligence service suggest that the
last major obstacle to bugging the switch in Mumbai actually was the
state-owned company that ran it. But it was privatized earlier this
decade, sold to the enormous Indian holding company called the Tata Group, which also owns, among other properties, the Taj Mahal hotel. Probably just a coincidence, but yet another interesting detail.
1 Comment
SF
I don’t know about technology. Indian forces took few days to take the Mumbai incident under control where as SL forces take any huge attacks (on airports, military bases, oil reserves, etc.) before the sunrise. Why indian forces were so weak? Where was the fault? was it lack of experiences?