When this episode of "Nova" begins, it appears to be an exposé about the National Security Administration (NSA), as it talks a bit about what the agency does, shows some of the facility near Ft. Meade, Maryland and discusses the role of the organization. All this is pretty interesting to me--particularly since I had family who worked there and they NEVER talked one bit about their jobs or the agency! However, what follows in the rest of the film was an examination in the weakness of NSA. While they gather gobs of information, they don't always have time to interpret it all AND often there has been a HUGE problem getting NSA, CIA and FBI officials to talk and share information--and part of this is due to silly rules imposed on them. The chronology of the events intercepted by NSA about the 9/11 murderers is shown. As a result of a screwed up system, the 9/11 attack was able to take place without the US government intervening to try to stop it. The film shows a long trail of information gathered by NSA and how it COULD have helped stop this terrorist attack--and it's quite sad and frustrating to see. But it doesn't stop here. The rest of the show is rather scary, as it discusses how NSA has changed since 9/11. Now, with new laws, the agency can pretty much spy on ANYONE--not just folks abroad or targeted known terrorists. While a benign government would not misuse this information, who's to say this will always be the case? Scary stuff, that's for sure. Overall, this is a rare, interesting and depressing look into NSA--and, in light of the failure, you wonder if things have actually changed for the better since 2001. Very well made and quite sobering.
2 Reviews
Spooky Plasma
tedg9 September 2009
The lens is not everything, but it can be nearly so.
The reporter can transform the news, she must. The world is not composed of narratives; we impose them. I tend to be more interested in the structural limits of this behavior than the case where the reporter's bias dominates. In other words, there is an unrealistic transformation that inevitably occurs when you observe the world and build a story.
As it happens, this is the chief problem that the NSA has. It has a great many facts, orders of magnitude more than August 2001. But it has no way to pull meaningful stories from them, and "stories" where intent and projected futures are apparent are what intelligence analysts are all about. Getting stories of any kind is difficult for interesting reasons not relevant here.
But when you do pull narrative out of facts, you have that distorted lensing that you have to account for. It isn't reality, but a linearized model with observational, situated inadequacies. This is something I work on professionally.
So it is a strange fold of sorts to see this TeeVee movie about the NSA. It is produced, and I suppose largely written by James Bamford, who also appears as witness, investigator and narrator. Bamford has been writing about the NSA since long before it was officially acknowledged, and his writings were very much that sort of distorted lens. How do physicists talk about quarks, being denied the ability to experience them as worldly objects? The same way that Bamford indirectly observed what is surely that largest, most complex and advanced technical/mathematical enterprise ever.
NSA exists now. It appears on maps, has a website and a more or less known budget. But it is still occluded from view. Most people who work there know little more than J Q public. But we have a detailed picture of what the place is and does. It all came from Bamford, all of it, until about 8 years ago. His lens, his story.
Early physicists thought of atoms and its constituents as tiny planetary systems. Its absurdly wrong in nearly every way, but we still teach and use that story, well because it was first.
Bamford's lens was the first with NSA. You will get a chance, if you watch this, to see him in action. He has many more facts than he did 25 years ago, and we can assume that they are correct, true in the ordinary sense. But he is using the same narrative. That is — if you are keeping track — about 9 generations in the computing theory and technology, and 3 in the key mathematical disciplines involved.
The NSA is profoundly broken, because of this lensing problem. If you watch this, you can see how that very lensing problem is presented in a similarly, profoundly broken way for the same reason.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
The reporter can transform the news, she must. The world is not composed of narratives; we impose them. I tend to be more interested in the structural limits of this behavior than the case where the reporter's bias dominates. In other words, there is an unrealistic transformation that inevitably occurs when you observe the world and build a story.
As it happens, this is the chief problem that the NSA has. It has a great many facts, orders of magnitude more than August 2001. But it has no way to pull meaningful stories from them, and "stories" where intent and projected futures are apparent are what intelligence analysts are all about. Getting stories of any kind is difficult for interesting reasons not relevant here.
But when you do pull narrative out of facts, you have that distorted lensing that you have to account for. It isn't reality, but a linearized model with observational, situated inadequacies. This is something I work on professionally.
So it is a strange fold of sorts to see this TeeVee movie about the NSA. It is produced, and I suppose largely written by James Bamford, who also appears as witness, investigator and narrator. Bamford has been writing about the NSA since long before it was officially acknowledged, and his writings were very much that sort of distorted lens. How do physicists talk about quarks, being denied the ability to experience them as worldly objects? The same way that Bamford indirectly observed what is surely that largest, most complex and advanced technical/mathematical enterprise ever.
NSA exists now. It appears on maps, has a website and a more or less known budget. But it is still occluded from view. Most people who work there know little more than J Q public. But we have a detailed picture of what the place is and does. It all came from Bamford, all of it, until about 8 years ago. His lens, his story.
Early physicists thought of atoms and its constituents as tiny planetary systems. Its absurdly wrong in nearly every way, but we still teach and use that story, well because it was first.
Bamford's lens was the first with NSA. You will get a chance, if you watch this, to see him in action. He has many more facts than he did 25 years ago, and we can assume that they are correct, true in the ordinary sense. But he is using the same narrative. That is — if you are keeping track — about 9 generations in the computing theory and technology, and 3 in the key mathematical disciplines involved.
The NSA is profoundly broken, because of this lensing problem. If you watch this, you can see how that very lensing problem is presented in a similarly, profoundly broken way for the same reason.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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