Who's in Big Brother's database?
Dave U. Random
Security Agency" by Matthew M. Aid (Amazon.com:
http://xrl.us/SecSen )
New York Review of Books
...the most original areas in "The Secret Sentry" deal with
the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the NSA was
forced to marry, largely unsuccessfully, its super-high-
tech strategic capabilities in space with its tactical
forces on the ground. Before the September 11 attacks, the
agency's coverage of Afghanistan was even worse than that
of Iraq. At the start of the war, the NSA's principal
listening post for the region did not have a single
linguist proficient in Pashto or Dari, Afghanistan's two
principal languages. Agency recruiters descended on
Fremont, California, home of the country's largest
population of Afghan expatriates, to build up a cadre of
translators�only to have most candidates rejected by the
agency's overparanoid security experts. On the plus side,
because of the collapse of the Taliban regime's rudimentary
communications system, its leaders were forced to
communicate only by satellite phones, which were very
susceptible to NSA monitoring.
Other NSA tactical teams collaborated on the ground with
Special Forces units, including in the mountains of Tora
Bora. But it was a new type of war, one the NSA was not
prepared for, and both Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader
Mullah Omar easily slipped through its electronic net.
Eight years later, despite billions of dollars spent by the
agency and dozens of tapes released by bin Laden, the NSA
is no closer to capturing him or Mullah Omar than it was at
Tora Bora in 2001...
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