James Bamford
More info
- Occupation
- Journalist, author
- Known for
- The Puzzle Palace (1982), The Shadow Factory (2008)
The journalist who wrote the first major book about the NSA at a time when the agency barely admitted to existing.
The Puzzle Palace appeared in 1982, built on documents Bamford had pried loose under the Freedom of Information Act. The Justice Department later tried to reclassify some of the material, which mainly made the book more famous. He followed it with Body of Secrets (2001) and The Shadow Factory (2008), the latter describing how the NSA began tapping the phone network from the inside after 9/11 — the same arrangement Mark Klein and Thomas Drake blew the whistle on.
In 2012 he wrote about the NSA's vast Utah data centre for Wired, and in 2014 he interviewed Edward Snowden in Moscow for the same magazine. For forty years he has done the thing the NSA would most like to discourage: read its paperwork carefully.