By Steve Hynd

Back in March, Sy Hersh caused a storm with some remarks at a University of Minnesota discussion.

the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

A lot of people were skeptical – myself included. Yet now mainstream outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are reporting a story that’s at least halfway there. The Washington Post summarizes:

The CIA ran a secret program for nearly eight years that aspired to kill top al-Qaeda leaders with specially trained assassins, but the agency declined to tell Congress because the initiative never came close to bringing Osama bin Laden and his deputies into U.S. cross hairs, U.S. intelligence and congressional officials said yesterday.

The plan to deploy teams of assassins to kill senior terrorists was legally authorized by the administration of George W. Bush, but it never became fully operational, according to sources briefed on the matter. The sources confirmed that then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney had urged the CIA to delay notifying Congress about the diplomatically sensitive plan — a bid for secrecy that congressional Democrats now say thwarted proper oversight.

The program, which was terminated last month, touched off a political firestorm last week when several Democrats said the CIA had misled Congress by not disclosing its existence. CIA Director Leon E. Panetta gave lawmakers their first overview on June 24, within hours of learning about it, the officials said.

Some officials familiar with the program said certain elements of it were operational and should have been disclosed because they involved “significant resources and high risk,” as one intelligence official described it. But others said the initiative never advanced beyond concepts and feasibility studies.

I have to say, I’ve no problem with tightly controlled targeted assassinations of the leaders of hostile terrorist groups if it’s done with a strategy in mind, one where the idea is to “hothouse” more moderate leaders by removing their rivals and making the moderates fearful for their own safety if they don’t “jaw, jaw instead of war, war”. I’ve argued for exactly that in the past and, after all, the only differences between a special forces bullet and a Predator-launched missile are that the bullet is cheaper and doesn’t also hit dozens of civilians. But such a program shouldn’t be secret – in fact it relies for some of its efficacy on being publicly known.

And the problem with secret assassination orders is mission creep.

it’s not at all clear why this particular program would be so radioactive — compared to what the U.S. was, and still is, doing more or less openly — that (1) Cheney would demand the CIA not brief Congress about it for eight years; (2) Panetta would cancel it immediately upon learning of it; and (3) Democrats would howl quite so loudly when finally informed.

Or to think about it another way, put yourself in the seat of a Democrat on one of the intel committees after 9/11. If you had any doubt about whether the intel agencies were targeting al Qaeda leaders, wouldn’t you have demanded that they show you proof they were? And if you didn’t have any doubt that they were, why are you complaining now about not being briefed?

It doesn’t add up. There’s more to this story to be told.

So is the rest of Sy Hersh’s story about to emerge into the light?

It’s not that controversial to have a team ready to kill or capture Bin Laden or other senior Al Qaeda operatives. It is controversial to have a team ready to kill … other targets.

Remember, the Bush administration told us that their warrantless wiretapping program was aimed only at Al Qaeda affiliates and we found out that was nowhere near the case. There were guys listening in on phone sex calls of innocent Americans by the time we found out about that program.

So, I have to ask what I previously thought unimaginable. Who exactly were the assassination squads supposed to assassinate?

I really don’t want to get into crazy speculation. I certainly don’t think this program would be turned inward as well. And it is eminently possible that it was just aimed at senior Al Qaeda guys, as I explained above. But given the history of the Bush administration and what has been less than honest explanations in the past, one has to ask – who were the targets under consideration?

If as a journalist, you don’t ask this question, then you’re not doing your job. It would be hard to argue this isn’t relevant.

Dick Cheney hid this program from Congress (under what authority could he order a program like this in the first place?) and ordered the CIA to lie about it to the rest of the government (including large portions of the FBI and CIA). Is it not conceivable that as Cheney worked the “dark side,” he gave other unimaginable orders? Did Bush even know what orders Cheney was giving? Did Bush know who was on the assassination list? If they had a program, they had a list, right? Who’s on the list?

If they bothered to have assassination squads, it seems inconceivable that they didn’t make a list. Does anyone have that list? Where is it now? And who’s on it?

And if the CIA program didn’t get fully going was there a parallel military program, still secret, that did?

The Associated Press

The CIA revealed the identity of a clandestine officer killed six years ago and dedicated the 90th star on its memorial wall.

CIA Director Leon Panetta on Monday identified the officer killed in Ethiopia in 2003 as Gregg Wenzel, 33.

According to public accounts, Wenzel was a foreign service officer at the State Department. He was killed by a drunk driver in Addis Ababa who was convicted but as of 2008, had not been caught.

Wenzel was a member of the first clandestine service training class to graduate after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was a former public defender in Florida and an Ironman triathlete.

Wenzel grew up in Monroe, N.Y., and earned a law degree from the University of Miami law school.

Published: May 28, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.

The military command would complement a civilian effort to be announced by President Obama on Friday that would overhaul the way the United States safeguards its computer networks.

Mr. Obama, officials said, will announce the creation of a White House office — reporting to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council — that will coordinate a multibillion-dollar effort to restrict access to government computers and protect systems that run the stock exchanges, clear global banking transactions and manage the air traffic control system.

White House officials say Mr. Obama has not yet been formally presented with the Pentagon plan. They said he would not discuss it Friday when he announced the creation of a White House office responsible for coordinating private-sector and government defenses against the thousands of cyberattacks mounted against the United States — largely by hackers but sometimes by foreign governments — every day.

But he is expected to sign a classified order in coming weeks that will create the military cybercommand, officials said. It is a recognition that the United States already has a growing number of computer weapons in its arsenal and must prepare strategies for their use — as a deterrent or alongside conventional weapons — in a wide variety of possible future conflicts.

The White House office will be run by a “cyberczar,” but because the position will not have direct access to the president, some experts said it was not high-level enough to end a series of bureaucratic wars that have broken out as billions of dollars have suddenly been allocated to protect against the computer threats.

The main dispute has been over whether the Pentagon or the National Security Agency should take the lead in preparing for and fighting cyberbattles. Under one proposal still being debated, parts of the N.S.A. would be integrated into the military command so they could operate jointly.

Officials said that in addition to the unclassified strategy paper to be released by Mr. Obama on Friday, a classified set of presidential directives is expected to lay out the military’s new responsibilities and how it coordinates its mission with that of the N.S.A., where most of the expertise on digital warfare resides today.

The decision to create a cybercommand is a major step beyond the actions taken by the Bush administration, which authorized several computer-based attacks but never resolved the question of how the government would prepare for a new era of warfare fought over digital networks.

It is still unclear whether the military’s new command or the N.S.A. — or both — will actually conduct this new kind of offensive cyberoperations.

The White House has never said whether Mr. Obama embraces the idea that the United States should use cyberweapons, and the public announcement on Friday is expected to focus solely on defensive steps and the government’s acknowledgment that it needs to be better organized to face the threat from foes attacking military, government and commercial online systems.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pushed for the Pentagon to become better organized to address the security threat.

Initially at least, the new command would focus on organizing the various components and capabilities now scattered across the four armed services.

Officials declined to describe potential offensive operations, but said they now viewed cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields.

“We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain,“ said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.”

Although Pentagon civilian officials and military officers said the new command was expected to initially be a subordinate headquarters under the military’s Strategic Command, which controls nuclear operations as well as cyberdefenses, it could eventually become an independent command.

“No decision has been made,” said Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh, a Pentagon spokesman. “Just as the White House has completed its 60-day review of cyberspace policy, likewise, we are looking at how the department can best organize itself to fill our role in implementing the administration’s cyberpolicy.”

The creation of the cyberczar’s office inside the White House appears to be part of a significant expansion of the role of the national security apparatus there. A separate group overseeing domestic security, created by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, now resides within the National Security Council. A senior White House official responsible for countering the proliferation of nuclear and unconventional weapons has been given broader authority. Now, cybersecurity will also rank as one of the key threats that Mr. Obama is seeking to coordinate from the White House.

The strategy review Mr. Obama will discuss on Friday was completed weeks ago, but delayed because of continuing arguments over the authority of the White House office, and the budgets for the entire effort.

It was kept separate from the military debate over whether the Pentagon or the N.S.A. is best equipped to engage in offensive operations. Part of that debate hinges on the question of how much control should be given to American spy agencies, since they are prohibited from acting on American soil.

“It’s the domestic spying problem writ large,” one senior intelligence official said recently. “These attacks start in other countries, but they know no borders. So how do you fight them if you can’t act both inside and outside the United States?”

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Published: May 10, 2009

WEST POINT, N.Y. — The Army forces were under attack. Communications were down, and the chain of command was broken.

Pacing a makeshift bunker whose entrance was camouflaged with netting, the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”

These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The N.S.A. made the cadets’ task more difficult by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on millions of computers around the world.

The competition was a final exam of sorts for a senior elective class. The cadets, who were computer science and information technology majors, competed against teams from the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine as well as the Naval Postgraduate School and the Air Force Institute of Technology. Each team was judged on how well it subdued the threats from the N.S.A.

The cyberwar games at West Point are just one example of a heightened awareness across the military that it must treat the threat of a computer attack as seriously as it does an attack carried out by a bomber or combat brigade. There is hardly an American military unit or headquarters that has not been ordered to analyze the risk of cyberattacks to its mission — and to train to counter them. If the hackers were to succeed, they could change information on the network and cripple Internet communications.

In the desert outside Las Vegas, in a series of inconspicuous trailers, some of the most highly motivated hackers in the United States spend their days and nights probing the military’s vast computer networks for weaknesses to exploit.

These hackers — many of whom got their start as teenagers devoted to computer screens in their basements — have access to the latest in attack software. Some of it was developed by cryptologists at the N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, where most of the government’s talent for breaking and making computer codes resides.

The hackers have an official name — the 57th Information Aggressor Squadron — and a real home, Nellis Air Force Base.

The Army last year created its own destination for computer experts, the Network Warfare Battalion, where many of the cadets in the cyberwar games hope to be assigned. But even so, the ranks are still small.

The Defense Department today graduates only 80 students a year from its cyberwar schools, causing Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to complain that the Pentagon is “desperately short of people who have capabilities in this area in all the services, and we have to address it.” Under current Pentagon budget proposals, the number of students cycled through the schools will be quadrupled in the next two years.

Part of the Pentagon’s effort to increase the military’s capabilities are the annual cyberwar games played at the nation’s military academies, including West Point, where young cadets in combat boots and buzz cuts talk megabytes instead of megatons on a campus dotted with statues of generals, historic armaments and old stone buildings.

While the Pentagon has embraced the need for offensive cyberwarfare, there were no offensive maneuvers in the games last month, said Col. Joe Adams, who teaches Information Assurance and stood at the head of the classroom during the April exercise.

Cadet Joshua Ewing said he and his fellow Blue Team members “learn all the techniques that a hacker would do, and we try to beat a hacker.”

These strategies are not just theoretical. Most of these cadets will soon be sent to Afghanistan to carry out such work, Cadet Ewing said.

When the military deploys in a combat zone or during a domestic emergency, establishing a secure Internet connection is an early priority. To keep things humming, the military’s experts must fend off the ordinary chaos of the Internet as well as attacks devised to disable the communications system, like flooding e-mail servers with so many junk messages that they collapse.

Underscoring how seriously the cadets were taking the April games, the sign above the darkened entranceway in Thayer Hall read “Information Warfare Live Fire Range” and the area was draped with camouflage netting.

One group had to retrieve crucial information from a partly erased hard drive. One common method of hiding text, said Cadet Sean Storey, is to embed it in digital photographs; he had managed to find secret documents hidden this way. He was seeking a password needed to read encrypted e-mail he had located on the hard drive.

Other cadets worked in tandem, as if plugging a leaky dam, to keep the entire system working as the N.S.A. hackers attacked the engine that runs a crucial database as well as the e-mail server.

They shouted out various Internet addresses to inspect — and usually block — after getting clearance from referees. And there was that awkward moment when the cadet in charge, Salvatore Messina, had to act without clearance because the attack was so severe he couldn’t even send an e-mail message.

The cadets in this room do get their share of ribbing. But one cadet, Derek Taylor, said today’s soldiers recognize that technological expertise can be as vital as brute force in saving lives. West Point takes the competition seriously. The cadets who helped install and secure the operating system spent a week setting it up. The dean gives a pep talk; professors bring food.

Brian McCord, part of the team that installed the operating system, said he was chosen because his senior project was deeply reliant on Linux. The West Point team used this open-source operating system, freely available on the Internet, instead of relying on proprietary products from big-name companies like Microsoft or Sun Microsystems.

“It seems weird for the Army with its large contracts to be using Linux, but it’s very cheap and very customizable,” Cadet McCord said. It is also much easier to secure because “you can tweak it for everything you need” and there are not as many known ways to attack it, he said.

West Point emerged victorious in the games last month. That means the academy, which has won five of the last nine competitions, can keep the Director’s Cup trophy, which is displayed near a German Enigma encoding machine from World War II. Cracking the Enigma code helped the Allies win the war, and the machine is a stark reminder of the pivotal role of technology in warfare.

Published: March 3, 2009

WASHINGTON — A day after releasing a set of Bush administration opinions that claimed sweeping presidential powers in fighting terrorism, the Obama administration faced new pressure on Tuesday to support a broad inquiry into interrogation, detention, surveillance and other practices under President George W. Bush.

Justice Department officials said they might soon release additional opinions on those subjects. But the disclosure of the nine formerly secret documents fueled calls by lawmakers for an independent commission to investigate and make public what the Bush administration did in the global campaign against terrorism.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said the revelations, together with the release of new information about the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, had underscored the need for a commission that would have the power to subpoena documents and testimony.

Officials who discussed the process spoke on the condition of anonymity because memorandums still under review might involve classified information. Among those that have not been disclosed but are believed to exist are a memorandum from the fall of 2001 justifying the National Security Agency’s program of domestic surveillance without warrants and one from the summer of 2002 that listed specific harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that the C.I.A. was authorized to use.

The Justice Department officials said the decision to release the nine memorandums on Monday came after some of the opinions were sought in a civil lawsuit in California. They said department lawyers had determined that the opinions did not contain classified information.

The lawsuit was filed by Jose Padilla, a United States citizen who was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and detained for years as an enemy combatant before eventually being tried and convicted in a civilian criminal procedure. Mr. Padilla is suing John C. Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer who was the author of many of the opinions justifying detention and interrogation policies.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday on whether to create a commission to look into the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy. The committee chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, has already called for a commission, and another Democrat on the panel said Tuesday that he would support such an approach.

But David B. Rivkin Jr., an associate White House counsel under the first President Bush who is scheduled to testify at the hearing on Wednesday, said he planned to urge Congress not to move forward with that proposal, which he said would violate the rights of Bush administration officials and set them up for prosecutions by foreign courts.

“They want to pillory people,” Mr. Rivkin said. “They want to destroy their reputation. They want to drag them through the mud and single them out for foreign prosecutions. And if you get someone in a perjury trap, so much the better.”

President Obama has signaled a reluctance to open a wide-ranging investigation into his predecessor’s policies, saying he preferred to fix the policies and move on. In his first days in office, he issued executive orders requiring strict adherence to rules against torture. As a senator, he voted for legislation that brought surveillance efforts into alignment with federal statutes.

The increased calls for a greater public accounting come as the Justice Department’s internal ethics office is preparing to release a report that is expected to criticize sharply members of the Bush legal team who wrote memorandums purporting to provide legal justification for the use of harsh interrogation methods on detainees despite anti-torture laws and treaties, according to department and Congressional officials.

The Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department is examining whether certain political appointees in the department knowingly signed off on an unreasonable interpretation of the law to provide legal cover for a program sought by Bush White House officials.

The report is expected to focus on three former officials of the Office of Legal Counsel: Mr. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, now on leave at Chapman University, who was the principal author of opinions on national security matters from 2001 to 2003; Jay S. Bybee, who oversaw the counsel’s office during that period and is now a federal appeals court judge; and Steven G. Bradbury, who oversaw the counsel’s office in Mr. Bush’s second term.

Mr. Bradbury wrote two of the opinions released on Monday. Written last October and this January, they broadly repudiated the aggressive theory of virtually unlimited commander-in-chief power at the heart of Mr. Yoo’s memorandums.

Although he was a critic of Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury himself wrote three memorandums on the use of harsh interrogation techniques in 2005. Those documents are believed to be part of the Office of Professional Responsibility’s investigation.

In a footnote to Mr. Bradbury’s January memorandum that sharply criticized Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury signaled that he did not want a repudiation of Mr. Yoo’s legal reasoning to be used against him as part of the ethics inquiry.

Mr. Bradbury wrote that his retractions were not “intended to suggest in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the opinions in question” violated any “applicable standards of professional responsibility.”

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

Published: January 15, 2009

WASHINGTON — In a rare public ruling, a secret federal appeals court has said telecommunications companies must cooperate with the government to intercept international phone calls and e-mail of American citizens suspected of being spies or terrorists.

The ruling came in a case involving an unidentified company’s challenge to 2007 legislation that expanded the president’s legal power to conduct wiretapping without warrants for intelligence purposes.

But the ruling, handed down in August 2008 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review and made public Thursday, did not directly address whether President Bush was within his constitutional powers in ordering domestic wiretapping without warrants, without first getting Congressional approval, after the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Several legal experts cautioned that the ruling had limited application, since it dealt narrowly with the carrying out of a law that had been superseded by new legislation. But the ruling is still the first by an appeals court that says the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for warrants does not apply to the foreign collection of intelligence involving Americans. That finding could have broad implications for United States national security law.

The court ruled that eavesdropping on Americans believed to be agents of a foreign power “possesses characteristics that qualify it for such an exception.”

Bruce M. Selya, the chief judge of the review court, wrote in the opinion that “our decision recognizes that where the government has instituted several layers of serviceable safeguards to protect individuals against unwarranted harms and to minimize incidental intrusions, its efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”

The three-judge court, which hears rare appeals from the full Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, addressed provisions of the Protect America Act, passed by Congress in 2007 amid the controversy over Mr. Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants. It found that the administration had put in place sufficient privacy safeguards to meet the constitutional standards of the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. Because of that, the company had to cooperate, the court said.

That finding bolstered the Bush administration’s broader arguments on wiretapping without warrants, both critics and supporters said.

William C. Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University who has criticized the administration’s legal position on eavesdropping, said that while the ruling did not address Mr. Bush’s surveillance without warrants directly, “it does bolster his case” by recognizing that eavesdropping for national security purposes did not always require warrants.

Coming in the final days of the Bush administration, the ruling was hailed by the administration and conservatives as a victory for an aggressive approach to counterterrorism. The Justice Department said in a statement that it was “pleased with this important ruling.”

“It provides a very good result; it reaffirms the president’s right to conduct warrantless searches,” said David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer who has served in Republican administrations.

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the ruling “reinforces the significant, bipartisan political consensus” in favor of the president’s broad assertions of wiretapping powers.

But others were cautious about the significance of the ruling.

“I think this kind of maintains the status quo,” said Scott Silliman, an expert on national security law at Duke University. “I don’t think it is a surprise that the FISA court found that the legislation was constitutional. They are going to defer to Congress, especially since there was a lot of discussion when the law was passed about the ability of the government to compel providers.”

The ruling is the latest legal chapter in a dispute dating back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when Mr. Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international communications of American citizens without the approval of Congress or the courts. After the agency’s program was publicly disclosed in December 2005, critics said it violated a 1978 law. The White House initially opposed any new legislation to regulate surveillance, arguing that it would be an infringement of the president’s powers.

But after the Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, the administration agreed to bring the N.S.A. program under the jurisdiction of the FISA court. In 2007, Congress passed the Protect America Act, which was replaced in 2008 by another surveillance law.

The case arose in 2007, when a telecommunications company refused to comply with the government’s demands that it cooperate without warrants under the terms of the Protect America Act. The company was forced to comply, under threat of contempt, while it challenged the law in the FISA court, the opinion noted.

The company argued that the law violated the constitutional rights of its customers and that the act placed too much power and discretion in the hands of the executive branch. It also raised specific privacy problems, which the court ruling did not identify, that could occur under the surveillance directives it had received from the government.

In rejecting the company’s complaint, the FISA appeals court found that the administration had so carefully carried out the Protect America Act that it was not in violation of the Fourth Amendment. It concluded that the procedures put in place under the law properly balanced the constitutional rights of American citizens and the national security interests of the government.

The company argued that “by placing discretion entirely in the hands of the executive branch without prior judicial involvement, the procedures cede to that branch overly broad power that invites abuse,” the court wrote.

But, the court ruled, “this is little more than a lament about the risk that government officials will not operate in good faith.’

“That sort of risk exists even when a warrant is required,” it said.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

“Probably the best place within the entire region to install a listening post is the Indian city of Mumbai,” JamesBamford writes in “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” his latest book about the all-seeing, all-hearing National Security Agency. Without question, he says, Mumbai, India, “represents the kind of location where the N.S.A. would seek to establish a secret presence.” And such a place, he notes elsewhere in his book, “presents an extremely tempting target for terrorists.”

As it happened, I read those lines at precisely the same time that Mumbai became the scene of a bloody three-day siege that killed more than 170 people and wounded many hundreds. Telecoms were not attacked, and whether there was some symbolic connection between the N.S.A.’s ambitions and the terrorists’ targeting is not a question that can be answered definitively here and now or, perhaps, ever. But it’s a fair bet that Bamford will find a way to work the bloodbath at the Taj Mahal hotel into the long N.S.A. narrative that he began with “The Puzzle Palace” in 1982, followed up with “Body of Secrets” in 2001, and may well continue with paperback updates and further sequels after the present book. These are the kinds of details, or coincidences, that Bamford loves. In “The Shadow Factory” he piles one on top of another — events, addresses, room numbers — in a slapped-together text that often blends facts with speculation to evoke a pervasive atmosphere of conspiracy.

Which is not to say conspiracies do not exist. At its core and at its best, Bamford’s book is a schematic diagram tracing the obsessions and excesses of the Bush administration after 9/11, a valuable complement to the accumulating narratives of torture abroad and legalistic sophistry at home. Other writers might conclude, as Bamford does, that “there is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America,” without really leading readers to think they’ll be waterboarded someday. It would be hard, however, for those reading this book to believe that their digital identities and electronic communications, of any type over any medium, have not been subject to unreasonable search and seizure, constantly and without warrants or recourse.

But let’s go back to India for a moment. 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.

For the moment, at least, the most important switches of all are in the United States, which is still the center of the digital communications universe. Today, even phone calls between neighbors on the far side of the world are broken up into packets that may wind up crossing American territory, albeit at the speed of light, before they get down the block in, say, Baghdad. Before 9/11, the N.S.A. tried with only very limited success to tap into the United States switches. But in the weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the head of the N.S.A., , “succeeded in gaining the cooperation of nearly all of the nation’s telecommunications giants,” according to Bamford. Could those switches and cables being tapped in the United States be called wires? Yes indeed. And was this being done without warrants? Yes, again. But “warrantless wiretapping” — that phrase connoting scandalous disrespect for American laws and freedoms — doesn’t begin to describe the staggering volume of raw information the cables put at the N.S.A.’s disposal.

The process is the opposite of what “wiretapping” used to mean in the popular imagination: alligator clips on a single wire that got you exactly the phone line you wanted to monitor. The N.S.A.’s approach in effect intercepted just about all communications, then used sophisticated computers and software to sift through the material. And, as with conventional warfare, these big-ticket spying operations were contracted to private companies that put former government employees on their payrolls — what Bamford calls “the ­surveillance-industrial complex.”

Is all this really necessary to fight the terrorist threat that actually exists? Is it really useful to accumulate watch lists that have half a million names on them? The administration’s core argument, including and especially after The New York Times broke the story of the warrantless program in 2005, is that it is vital to prevent another 9/11. But in a ferocious, detailed attack on Hayden (who is now the director of the Central Intelligence Agency), Bamford argues that the N.S.A. in 2000 and 2001 had not only the means, but also the actual information necessary to prevent the attacks on New York and Washington. The agency had been monitoring communications out of an Al Qaeda command center in Yemen, and those had pointed squarely to the presence of two key plotters in California. Yet Hayden at that moment didn’t want to risk any semblance of monitoring people in the United States, even though there was plenty of latitude to tap those two terrorists under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

One of the most disturbing passages in the book explores the paradox that the final meetings among the hijackers before they embarked on their missions took place in Laurel, Md., which is essentially the N.S.A.’s company town. Hayden could have practically observed them “from his eighth-floor window,” Bamford writes; their base was the Valencia Motel, “a shabby truck stop just two miles away from Hayden’s office.” No wonder that in the aftermath of 9/11 Hayden wanted to be seen by the president as vacuuming up all the information in the world, and warrants be damned.

So, have the laws promulgated since the program was exposed, including the one voted for by Senator Barack Obama last summer, ended the nightmare of pervasive surveillance? Bamford thinks not. Presidential power remains abundant, he says, and “it is the political courage that is in short supply.” Loopholes are easy to maneuver in an atmosphere of hypersecrecy, and what the N.S.A. does not do itself, it may well ask of partner agencies with similar abilities. That was why Bamford was writing about India. It could be one of those partners. 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.