James Bamford Quotations

Maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe the next time he tries to enter the United States or Britain he will be denied, without explanation. Maybe he will be arrested.

NSA prides itself on learning the lessons of the 1970s and obeying the legal restrictions imposed by FISA. Now it looks like we're going back to the bad old days again.

He would have been on the bottom of my list in terms of suspects.

He'd have a natural interest in what a Russian spymaster had to say, ... It turned out later that he was the person Hanssen originally sent his letter to apply for his job at the KGB.

Here the transcripts are saying, 'Well, you know, there may be people speaking English on this ship,' ... Why would you say that if it's an Egyptian ship, carrying horses?

Today one of the key aspects of NSA is what they call 'information at rest,' this is information in databases.

Every time a Soviet plane took off, NSA knew about it. It was pretty easy to track. Now they have to track people who use cell phones, pay phones and calling cards ... You have to be a bit optimistic to think it will work.

The whole idea of the NSA is intercepting huge streams of communications, taking in 2 million pieces of communications an hour.

It's a return to the bad old days of the N.S.A..

It's a vacuum cleaner approach to virtually millions of communications an hour. Nobody knows what they're doing with it.

It was basically Western Union for cables, and AT&T for the telephone. It's much more complicated now.

It produces, probably produces, 80 percent of the intelligence the United States uses, ... The Puzzle Palace.

It shows people do try to cover up when they make mistakes.

It shows how just somebody riding in the back seat of a car in a remote part of a remote desert, and somebody sitting at a desk at NSA could actually hear their voice and take action immediately.

They (Bush administration) wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn't think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people.

The fact that we were attacked, the fact that nobody seems to have known anything about it, is an indication to me that they haven't broken it, ... In my opinion, this is the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.

Clearly the flag was there, ... because the intercepts show that the helicopter pilots saw it immediately, before they ever even got up to the ship.