Product Description

How does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on? And is the interception of communication an effective means of predicting and preventing future attacks? These are some of the questions at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant new book, Chatter.

In the late 1990s, when Keefe was a graduate student in England, he heard stories about an eavesdropping network led by the United States that spanned the planet. The system, known as Echelon, allowed America and its allies to intercept the private phone calls and e-mails of civilians and governments around the world. Taking the mystery of Echelon as his point of departure, Keefe explores the nature and context of communications interception, drawing together fascinating strands of history, fresh investigative reporting, and riveting, eye-opening anecdotes. The result is a bold and distinctive book, part detective story, part travel-writing, part essay on paranoia and secrecy in a digital age.

Chatter starts out at Menwith Hill, a secret eavesdropping station covered in mysterious, gargantuan golf balls, in England’s Yorkshire moors. From there, the narrative moves quickly to another American spy station hidden in the Australian outback; from the intelligence bureaucracy in Washington to the European Parliament in Brussels; from an abandoned National Security Agency base in the mountains of North Carolina to the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

As Keefe chases down the truth of contemporary surveillance by intelligence agencies, he unearths reams of little-known information and introduces us to a rogue’s gallery of unforgettable characters. We meet a former British eavesdropper who now listens in on the United States Air Force for sport; an intelligence translator who risked prison to reveal an American operation to spy on the United Nations Security Council; a former member of the Senate committee on intelligence who says that oversight is so bad, a lot of senators only sit on the committee for the travel.

Provocative, often funny, and alarming without being alarmist, Chatter is a journey through a bizarre and shadowy world with vast implications for our security as well as our privacy. It is also the debut of a major new voice in nonfiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98183 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-15
• Released on: 2005-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The secret global information network that has come together under the umbrella name "Echelon" is detailed here by Yale Law student Keefe. While Great Britain led the way in the mid-'70s, Keefe marks the U.S., Kenya, Pakistan, Singapore and many others as current participants, taking satellite pictures from 10 miles up, sending submarines to hover silently and aiming portable laser devices to pick up conversations inside rooms. All the technologies are impressive, but the burgeoning mountain of data they produce, Keefe argues, does not always prove useful. Likewise, he illustrates how compact electronics can give the opposition a large ability to deceive the Echelon network, and/or to modify their behavior when they detect that they are under surveillance. Ultimately, Keefe makes a case that electronics have not solved the ancient dilemma of deciphering the enemy's intentions (what he is actually planning) from his capabilities (all the things he could choose to do). To prove his point, Keefe cites the mass of rumor and innuendo that failed to give specific warning of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole as well as Colin Powell's U.N. proclamation that Iraq possessed nerve gas. And, Keefe says, ordinary citizens pay a substantial cost in presumed privacy, as well as in potential for abuses of confidential data. Intelligent and polemical, Keefe's study is sure to spark some political chatter of its own. Agent, Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbitt. (On sale Feb. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
"Secrecy is a maverick element," Keefe writes, in this critical analysis of American intelligence-gathering. His book examines the history of America's spy programs and those of its allies and—using little investigation and no classified sources—unveils much of the inner workings of the National Security Agency (a hundred satellites, thirty thousand eavesdroppers, a six-billion-dollar budget). Keefe also worries about the self-defeating effects of keeping so much from the public: secrecy might be essential to the success of spy missions, but it can also conceal privacy violations, abuses of power, and, perhaps worst of all, operational failure. Keefe writes with frustration that, facing allegations of malfeasance or incompetence, the N.S.A. or the C.I.A. will simply stonewall. "Trust us," the agency will say. "We can't tell you why you should trust us. But trust us."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
Deep in a North Yorkshire moor, in a part of England where sheep and cows outnumber residents and crumbling stone walls snake through endless green pastures like stitches on a quilt, a secretive moon base comes suddenly into view. Low, moss-covered walls give way to tall, barb-crowned fences; weathered farmhouses are replaced by dozens of massive white spheres, pock-marked like giant golf balls shimmering in the sun; farmers on tractors disappear, and heavily armed guards in armor-plated vehicles take their place. Welcome to Menwith Hill, the largest eavesdropping base on Earth and America's ear on the world.

What goes in and out of those domes -- used to hide satellite dishes shaped like giant ice cream scoops -- is the subject of Patrick Radden Keefe's first book. At least, that was his hope. Unfortunately, he could find few who would cooperate with him, and the U.S. National Security Agency, which operates the base, refused to respond to his many queries. As the author of two books on the agency, I have found that silence is a reception common to most who dare knock on its door. After all, NSA's initials have long been said to stand for No Such Agency or Never Say Anything.

Nevertheless, Keefe, a third-year law student at Yale, does a wonderful job of exploring the surrounding territory: the role of SIGINT, or signals intelligence (NSA's $5 word for eavesdropping), in the post-Cold War world; the mysterious Echelon system that links the many listening posts belonging to America's English-speaking allies; the agency's obsession with secrecy; the age-old question of human versus technical intelligence collection; and even the people who have written about the agency, including me, who he generously refers to as "the uncontested civilian authority on the agency" and "the foremost chronicler of the NSA."

Keefe also notes, "When Bamford was writing his first book, The Puzzle Palace, in the early 1980s, the agency did everything it could to thwart his efforts along the way, denying him access and even threatening legal action. When he published a follow-up book, Body of Secrets, in 2001, it featured an extensive interview with [NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael V.] Hayden, and the book party was thrown at Hayden's invitation, at Fort Meade. . . . Bamford, meanwhile, has gone from being the scourge of the NSA to the agency's hagiographer."

But the difference between my two books on NSA was not in my approach to the agency. In the three years I worked on Body of Secrets, I made no deals with the agency, gave them no access to my manuscript, and it ended up winning a top investigative award, just like The Puzzle Palace. Instead, it was the NSA that had changed. As Keefe himself acknowledges, "Hayden presided over a period of openness like none the agency had ever seen."

Keefe's style alternates from breezy to academic. "I am not an investigative journalist, by training or inclination," he writes. He compares his quest to find the secrets of signals intelligence to the obsession of Marlow, Joseph Conrad's narrator in Heart of Darkness, to fill in the unknown "blank spaces on the earth." "In the twenty-first century, we are no longer afforded such alluring cartographic mysteries," Keefe writes, "but I found, as I started probing the world of signals intelligence, that it occupies a similarly uncharted shadow land in our contemporary consciousness."

Among the largest "blank spaces" he tried to fill in was the highly classified Echelon worldwide eavesdropping network. Another was the super-secret UKUSA agreement, which originally created the network and is signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. "The Anglophone network is said to hear absolutely everything," he writes, "yet its existence remains a secret -- unknown in some cases even to the legislative bodies of the countries that run it." At times his quixotic search seemed more like a hunt for the Loch Ness monster or the Abominable Snowman. In a local pub near the massive Menwith Hill listening post, he ran into someone who once worked in the base cafeteria. "From what I hear," the man told him, raising an eyebrow, "it's an alien-testing zone."

More seriously, Keefe raises a number of important issues that need to be addressed as America's spy world simultaneously expands in size and shrinks in visibility, like ripples from a stone tossed in a pond. First and foremost is the role of human intelligence in a time of terrorist threats from abroad and fear-mongering at home.

The most overused cliche in the spy business is that we have too much technical intelligence and not enough human intelligence. In fact, human intelligence has always been largely useless, or even less than useless. From 1985 until at least 1992, most of the dozen or so spies the CIA managed to recruit in Moscow had been compromised by turncoats Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI. Thus, rather than intelligence, it was more likely disinformation the Soviet agents may have, unwittingly, been passing on -- before the Soviets executed them. In the war on terrorism, human intelligence has thus far played an equally dismal role. Under CIA Director George Tenet, neither al Qaeda nor Iraq -- two of America's most important targets -- was ever truly penetrated. The same likely goes for Iran and North Korea.

In contrast, throughout the Cold War technical intelligence provided a constant keyhole through which to watch -- and listen to -- America's most important targets. Signals intelligence told national security policy makers every time a plane lifted into the air from the Soviet Union; the frequencies with which to jam Russian missiles; what pilots were saying to their ground controllers, ship captains to their ports, generals to their missileers and Politburo members to the Kremlin. At the same time, imagery satellites provided a up-close view of Soviet missile silos, shipbuilding, troop movement and other critical items. Following the Cold War, imagery provided the key tip-off that Iraq was about to attack Kuwait in August 1990. And during the war on terrorism, the most useful indications of possible attacks have come from SIGINT intercepts, known colloquially as "chatter." Such signals also led to the capture of key bin Laden deputy Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others.

But, as Keefe makes clear, SIGINT is a two-edged sword. Although it offers a unique opportunity to detect and deter acts of terrorism, it can also be a dangerous weapon against the privacy of innocent Americans if used against them as a result of weakened legal protections. Inter arma silent leges goes an old Latin expression: "During wartime, laws are silent."

Much to his credit, it is an issue about which Michael V. Hayden warned Congress. "What I really need you to do," he told members of the intelligence committees, "is to talk to your constituents and find out where the American people want the line between security and liberty to be."

In the end, Keefe argues that the vital debate over where to draw that line should not be left just to intelligence officials and Congress. The public, he insists, must educate itself as best it can and weigh in on the decision: "The one conviction I came away with is that if we ignore this issue, put off by the level of secrecy or the technical complexity involved, we do so at our own peril." His concern is reflected in another old Latin phrase, Quis custodiet ipsos custodies: Who is watching the watchers?

Reviewed by James Bamford
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A page-turner...and Spooky
The author takes pretty complex issues,like how U.S. intelligence eavesdrops on phone calls and emails, and presents them in a fast-paced and easy to understand way. Reading the book you realize that anyone can listen to anyone these days and privacy is disappearing very quickly. Most of the book is actually about how you go about writing about somethnig that is so secret that there is no accountability to congress, not to mention the press. But what makes it a good read is that you experience that process along with the author, the frustration of trying to figure out just how much surveillance our government does and how good at it they are. For those who don't know a lot about how the U.S. listens in, this book will probably freak you out, and it might make you angry as well. Either way, you won't put it down.

Very Entertaining
Its written more like spy novel, yet it still deals honestly with the very important issues of our intelligence network. I think the author is dead on when he talks about our need for more human intelligence. He does this with numerous anecdotes, which are both interesting and very entertaining. Overall, the presentation is very well balanced without the polemic we so often hear coming out of most contemporary writers. Entertaining and a must read for anyone interested in our national defense

Unnerving, entertaining, and prescient.
Good place to get started on communications intelligence -- especially in light of the Bush Admin domestic eavesdropping flap -- that makes Keefe look prescient.

The book is written in entertaining, digestible yet intelligent style, only infrequently forced or self-indulgent. His discussion of the TIA program is hysterical -- and chilling. I didn't mind the self-report/travelogue aspect since part of his purpose is to characterize various sources and 'names' in the field and show how geographically broad it is. That in turn is part of his larger goal: "Just how much of this is paranoid, and how much is reality?" He illustrates that issue and the trouble finding balance by his variably successful efforts to meet people or get information from them. (He comes off sounding like a bemused boy scout at times as he careens among disaffected spies, muck-raking journalists, conspiracy theorists, and the occasional helpful 'grown-up.')

I would have liked more on the emerging technical aspects of Comint, but as Keefe repeatedly cautions, whatever 'they' (officialdom) will let you know about their real capabilities is already ten years out of date; what you can dig up on your own is probably wildly exaggerated -- but you can't be sure. Whenever he gets close to 'state of the art' reporting, his sources worry about exposing their potential profit-margin as much as breaching security. But that's his next book, perhaps. (He also gives the impression he worried about being responsible with what he revealed.)

Recommended -- a readable book that will make you say, 'Yikes!' a couple times a chapter.