"The Spy Factory," a PBS/Nova special on the NSA
Over the weekend I watched a Nova PBS special, "The Spy Factory," about the National Security Agency, or NSA, that was a riveting, fascinating piece of television journalism. The crux of the program centered on how the NSA had been listening to Osama Bin Laden's phone calls, many of them being calls in which he spoke directly with his terrorist operatives on the ground in the US, the same ones who went on to carry out the 9/11 attacks, for a number of years, but refused to share the intelligence they had gathered with the FBI or the CIA, agencies that could have conceivably stopped the attacks, a revelation that left me in utter awe of the seemingly endless levels of gross incompetence exhibited by the United States federal government.
Anyway, I felt compelled to post something about it, because I think that every American citizen should see it. Seriously. Here's a two minute trailer to give you a taste of what it's all about, and below the trailer I've linked to the four parts of the program, each of them about ten minutes long, that have been uploaded to YouTube.
Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. And part four is here.
4 comments:
Saw it last week. Amazing.
RJ
Oh yeah, should have added that the lack of collaboration between the spy agencies has not been a secret but the Bush administration did a bang-up job of keeping it on the back pages of the papers.
In the meantime, they were listening in on my 1-900 calls.
RJ
Are you kidding? They went out of their way to blame such things on prior administrations (hello, ever hear of Jamie Gorelick? the Church Commission?)!!!
Urbody should wikipedia or google Jamie Gorelick and her direct involvement in this and another major fuck-fest called Fannie Mae. Her connection to these massive problems in recent history is pretty awful.
As for your love of this Nova show, I caught only the tail end of it and was not impressed... in fact, I was shocked at how Pubic Broadcasting is wasting money putting out a production in 2009 which is rehashing known and resolved issues from 8 plus years ago. It's not productive to dwell obsessively on past attacks. Learn lessons and move on. New attempts to attack us are not likely to be planned and conducted in a linear fashion paralleling previous attacks. Instead we should be expecting something new. Like Dubya or not, don't be blind, the man helped revamp and was extremely vigilant about this. The results are there too. Many many foiled attacks.
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