Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed a Dominican Town

Halfway between Baltimore and Washington D.C. is a hidden city the headquarters of the National Security Agency NSA. Tens of thousands of mathematicians computer scientists analysts linguists and voice interceptors work in absolute secrecy for those and I know the joke was always that NSA stood for no such agency. For those on the inside the joke was that NSA stood for it. Never say anything NSA is job to secretly listen in on telephone conversations email communications anything and everything that might warn of plots to do harm. The scope of what happens at NSA is mind boggling. I don't think the average person can even begin to conceive of the staggering depth and breadth of what they have to do. But was NSA doing its job before the 9/11 attacks. It's a question that has never been thoroughly investigated. None of this information that we're speaking about this evening was in the 9/11 Commission report. They simply ignored all of it.

But author James Bamford has investigated and come up with a chilling tale of terrorists living in San Diego communicating with bin Laden's operations center in Yemen moving freely about and all the while NSA is listening in. But the NSA never alert any other agency that the terrorists were in the United States and moving across the country towards Washington. Since the 9/11 attacks and essay's role has grown even bigger along with its license to listen in on Americans here and abroad. It was incredibly uncomfortable to be listening to private personal conversations. It's almost like going through these diaries but this flood of information making America any safer. Looking to the Spy Factory right now. For the

funding for nová is provided by the following. I've been growing algae for 35 years. Blowsy get rid of algae we're trying to grow the algae very beautiful the color blue or red gold and green algae could be converted into biofuels that we could someday run our cars off using algae to form biofuels. We're not competing with the food supply here to help solve the greenhouse problem as well. We're making a big commitment to finding out just how much energy can help to meet the field demands of the world. Will your savings be enough to fund your retirement. What will happen if your spouse outlives you by many years. What will happen if you outlive your savings. The civic life knows that tomorrow's questions will require planning today with financial solutions and strength. Pacific Life can help you and your financial professional. Develop a plan for civic life the power to help

you succeed. And David H. Coping and discovering you know 8H. And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. Let the others say about. And in our age group on the southbound lane of the Baltimore Washington Parkway traffic has stalled as commuters crowd down a special restricted exit that disappears into the thick woods beyond hidden from view and protected by electrified fences and heavily armed guards is the largest most secret

and most technologically advanced intelligence agency in the world. The National Security Agency NSA. Its mission making and breaking codes tapping into foreign signals sifting through the international phone calls e-mails texting and instant messages that blanket the modern world. It's every day more than 20000 people flood into this secret city. Unlike undercover CIA operatives spying in hostile territory NSA spies use technology in what is believed to be the largest collection of mathematicians linguists and computer scientists on the planet. Author James Bamford has written about NSA for the past 25 years. For those in the know the joke

was always that NSA stood for no such agency. For those on the inside the joke was that NSA stood for it. Never say anything during the Cold War and I say circle nearly the entire Soviet Union was listening post to intercept military and diplomatic communications and say even listen in on Soviet leaders kind of the Kremlin from their limousines its headquarters in Fort Meade Maryland. And as they use the acres of supercomputers to break any coded communications but when the Soviet Union collapsed a new enemy emerged one NSA was never designed to engage that enemy was al-Qaida. Eric Haseltine was director of research. The Russians were easy to find and hard to

kill. And terrorists are hard to find easy to kill. Unlike the Soviets al-Qaida was a small scattered moving target headquartered in remote mountain training camps its soldiers communicated by cell and satellite phones. And if you look at the job of NSA to find the enemy they had to go from looking at an enemy that they kind of knew who they were and where they were that they didn't know who they were or where they were or how they communicated. For NSA the challenge was to change tactics to match an increasingly dangerous adversary in cities across Asia and the Middle East. Al Qaeda operatives were using public pay phones and internet cafes to plan a series of strikes that would culminate in the 9/11 attacks. At that point it was a race it was a race between how much could we rebuild

and have the type of capabilities you need against an individual or a small group of individuals who operate around the world and pay little attention to borders. Can you do that and can you rebuild the intelligence community in China. Those questions still resonate today. Was the National Security Agency the organization responsible for intercepting foreign calls and messages listening in on al Qaeda prior to 9/11. What role did the NSA play and are we any safer today. Surprisingly the 9/11 Commission never investigated the NSA as role as fully as it did those of the CIA or FBI but by carefully piecing together a variety of unclassified public records

the story of NSA and its role in the war on terror emerges. In my research I use thousands of documents available on the public record that included Intelligence Agency memos transcripts of terrorist trials and a secret FBI chronology of the 9/11 terrorist movements obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. One fact is clear from the sources they were monitoring the al Qaeda leader long before 9/11. In November 1996 a known al Qaeda contact buys an Inmarsat satellite phone from a store in a New York suburb. That phone is for Osama bin Laden. Once he starts dialing from Afghanistan NSA is listening posts quickly back into his conversations.

Analysts at the CIA like Michael Scheuer head of Alec Station the CIA's newly formed bin Laden tracking unit are also eager to get the information Osama bin Laden's Inmarsat telephone was really a godsend. It gave us an idea not only of where he was in Afghanistan but where Al-Qaeda as an organization was established because there were calls to various places in the world for NSA tapping into satellite calls is a basic tactic in what's known as signals intelligence. Inmarsat phones transmit signals straight to a satellite orbiting over the Indian Ocean. By tracking all calls in and out of Afghanistan the NSA quickly determines bin Laden's number 8 7 3 6 8 2 5 0 5 3 3 1. Once they have this they homed in on both sides of his conversations. Listening to bin Laden by means of a

huge dish in space and the person he's speaking to with a dish shaped antenna on the ground in the intelligence business signals intelligence is among the most important kind of intelligence options that electronic communications that are in the air whether from telephone to telephone from satellite to satellite from Inmarsat radio to Inmarsat radio and NSA collects those with a very broad array of electronic collection capability. But once you collect them all you have is the signals. And ultimately it all comes down to the human being human analysts plot out which numbers are being called from bin Laden's phone and how frequently they quickly discover that most of the calls from bin Laden's phone in Afghanistan are going to a house in Yemen 2000 miles to the south

in Yemen is central to understanding how al Qaeda operates is where Osama bin Laden's father was born and raised in a culture of clans. It didn't surprise me that bin Laden show a sauna for his logistics and communications that is surprising was tucked away in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. The headquarters was hidden in a small undistinguished house. The CIA said was the home of one of bin Laden's closest associates.

Bin Laden's phone calls aren't encrypted so there is no code for NSA super computers to break. Instead NSA voice interceptors and linguists painstakingly translate transcribe and write summaries of the calls. The summaries are shared with the CIA but its analysts at Alec Station want more. They believe that only by carefully studying each word will it be possible to understand bin Laden's intentions over time. If you read enough of these conversations you first get clued into the fact that maybe a bottle of milk doesn't mean bottle of milk and if you follow it long enough you develop a sense of what they're really talking about. But it's not possible to do unless you have the verbatim transcript. We went to Fort Meade to ask the NSA Deputy

Director of Operations for the transcripts and she said we are not going to share that with you. And that was the end NSA declined repeated requests for interviews. But its policy since its founding has been to never share raw data even with other intelligence agencies. Scheuer is so determined to get it he persuades the CIA to build its own ground station but without a satellite he can only get half of the conversations we would collect it translated send it to to NSA and ask for them for the other half of it so he could better understand it. But we never got a terrorist attack on Americans world. August 7th 1998. Al Qaeda strikes to U.S. embassies in East Africa the principal suspect was Osama bin Laden. Both NSA and CIA are monitoring the al Qaeda network but neither gives any warning at the two precisely

timed attacks. Truth of the matter is though we had various reports from human intelligence sources within East Africa that there was an al Qaeda operation brewing somewhere on the east coast of Africa. We could never really pin it down. The embassy attacks are technically on American soil so the FBI is called in and finds out about the house in Yemen. I first learned about the communications center in Yemen when I got to Nairobi after the embassy bombing there. That house was was a focal point for operatives in the field to call in that number then contact bin Laden to pass along information and receive instruction back with only a handful of ways to pin down bin Laden's location. Reconnaissance satellites spies on the ground and signals intelligence and essay's expertise is becoming increasingly important. If you've only got very few people who are hiding out in a cave somewhere they're looking for a very small target and very

few targets as opposed to big army division or big missile complex. So imagery intelligence was of relatively less value human intelligence in an environment where a terrorist network is all relatives blood relatives it becomes tougher to get information in that kind of network. I think one interpretation was that NSA understood that they were becoming more important in the grand scheme of things in the war on terror an American ship back in Yemen October 12th 2000 al Qaeda strikes again. This time it's an attack on the USS Cole moored off the coast of Yemen Yemen's port authority had been penetrated immediately suspect Osama bin Laden. Once again the U.S. intelligence community fails to give a timely warning of the attack. Frank Blanco NSA is executive director at the time says NSA was still confronting terrorist tactics with cold war technology.

You've got targets that are very mobile. They're using a variety of communications which are cell phones laptops. NSA had to begin to think about what is the real technology that is necessary and how much is it going to cost and where do we get the money. Money is a pressing issue. After the Cold War Congress had reduced NSA budget by a third while criticizing it for violating privacy laws. Concerned about the privacy rights of American citizens. There is no legitimate excuse for that. It is intolerable to think of the United States government of big brother or anybody else by law. NSA was prohibited from spying on American soil without approval from a special court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When I interviewed General Michael Hayden the head of the NSA I was surprised when he told me that they were monitoring less than half a dozen people in the

United States. He was very busy fighting Hollywood's image of NSA like you saw in the movie Enemy of the state the National Security Agency conducts worldwide surveillance. Fax phones satellite communication all at once in the country. The military could possibly have anything like this on the court. Twenty seven of us in intelligence community movies like enemy of the state are quite amusing because it made us look omniscient. We could collect anything we want and it's just not that way. It's not that way at all. You may collect a lot of stuff but you don't know what you've got. Really the biggest technology challenge was how do you deal with volumes of information like that and find dots connect dots understand dots. That's the problem. In late December 1999

NSA finds one very important dog it intercepts an alarming call to the house in Yemen instructing two al Qaeda foot soldiers to fly to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia for what sounds like a terrorist summit. The foot soldiers are Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. This is the phone call that sets in motion the 9/11 attacks. After picking up this critical call NSA passed on their first names to the FBI and the CIA but not their last names. Last name has been an NSA database for over a year because of his association with bin Laden's operations center in Yemen. But apparently the NSA never looked it up. The CIA does find out Meaders name in its database.

They ask security agents to make a copy of his passport as he passes through a checkpoint in Dubai. When analysts at CIA headquarters see it they are astonished to find a valid U.S. visa inside Alex Station. The CIA's bin Laden unit now has two FBI agents detailed to it Doug Miller and Mark Rosine. Let's say you want to call them or of course CIA requested the intelligence so they are in Malaysia to conduct surveillance of the subjects and find out as much as they can. They took photographs follow them and even one of the individuals had a visa to come to the U.S. fearing an al Qaeda terrorist may be headed to the U.S.. The agents are determined to tell the FBI. But a CIA official will not allow it. I guess I was the more senior agent so I went up to the individual that

had the ticket. So on the Yemeni cells the Yemeni operatives and I said to reset what's going on we've got to tell the bureau about this these guys clearly are bad. One of them at least has a multiple entry visa to the U.S. we've got to tell the FBI and she said to me no it's not the FBI case not the FBI jurisdiction. So I go tell Duncan McDonough Well what can we do. We if we had picked up the phone and called the Bureau I would have been violating the law were broken the law. I would have been removed from the building that day. What am I cleared suspended. No Magon. This is one of the most astonishing parts of this story. The CIA had FBI operatives working within their bin Laden unit. But when the FBI operas found out that the one and possibly two other terrorists had visas to the United States were heading for the United States. The CIA won't let them tell their headquarters that they were coming. Only the FBI could have put out alerts to

stop plead Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi if they tried to enter the United States January 15th 2000 Los Angeles International Airport United Airlines flight to arrives from Bangkok where the CIA lost Almihdhar and Alhazmi trail they pass through U.S. immigration undetected within two weeks. They move into the anonymity of a San Diego suburb. The FBI put together a chronology as part of its investigation into the 9/11 attack. The timeline a declassified copy is the movements and the activities of the hijackers while they're in the U.S. hiding in plain sight. They get driver's licenses in their own names. They use a local bank to pick up international wire transfers from a known al Qaeda finance chief. Their telephone number is even listed in the San Diego White Pages

Alhazmi. Nawaf M. 8 5 8 2 7 9 5 9 1 9. The CIA was forbidden from operating within the United States and the FBI didn't know they were here. So the only way to track the terrorists was if NSA continue to monitor their conversations as a call back to the house in Yemen. But nine days after Alhazmi and Almihdhar arrive in California the NSA has a catastrophic failure. I remember getting a phone call on January 24th 2000 that began with we have a problem. NSA systems actually stopped working. The most technologically advanced intelligence agency in the world capable of monitoring millions of simultaneous conversations is deaf and say was brain dead.

It took probably three to four maybe even five days to bring everything back up the way it was. It is unclear whether during those five days NSA misses any calls from the hijackers in San Diego. But what is certain is the FBI chronology spells out is that the hijackers waste no time settling in to their new neighborhood here as it says in the chronology. February 5th 2000 signed a lease to rent an apartment 6 4 0 0 1 at a road in San Diego February 25th Almihdhar purchased the Toyota Corolla in San Diego Calif. February 28 private jet company varify on Biharis insurance policy number 6 0 4 7 2 5 9 2 1 dash 0 huggy bear. March 20th the San Diego telephone number sociate. Now if has made a call with

60 Minutes to. That is one of many calls made from San Diego to bin Laden's operations center. The house in Yemen that NSA has been monitoring for over three years but NSA would not pass on that information to any other intelligence agency. Eleanor Hill investigated NSA his role in 9/11 for Congress. We were very surprised to learn that you know they had this information and if there are contacts from known terrorists in the United States with terrorist facilities abroad that's exactly the kind of information our intelligence community needs to have. They didn't have it. You put the NSA Intel and the FBI Intel together. You have both sides of the conversation. So they come in and find out where they're going listen to the whole list of the conversations or their homework whatever e-mails the possibilities are endless.

Once you're able to peer into someone's life. Incredibly the NSA never informed the FBI that these calls were coming from the United States. And we may never know why no one from NSA will discuss it. And the 9/11 Commission never investigated it. They either didn't realize that two terrorists were calling from the United States which is hard to believe because even I have caller ID which shows where it calls coming from or what's more likely is that they ignored it because they would have had to hand the contacts over to the FBI April 12th 2000 almost three months after the hijackers arrive in the U.S. NSA director Michael Hayden hints at another possible explanation for NSA silence already warned by Congress to respect Americans privacy rights. Hayden responds to the House Intelligence Committee with extreme caution. Put a fine point on this if as we are speaking here this afternoon the Sullivan Laden is walking across the bridge from Niagara Falls Ontario to Niagara Falls New York as he gets to the New York

side. He is an American person and my agency must respect his rights against unreasonable search and seizure as provided by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. But General Hayden knew the law permitted the agency to is drop on the terrorists without interruption if they enter the United States. You can link back who they want. Their connections have been lot of connection to the Yemeni house etc.. You could have gone to any court any judge and FISA court and say we want to fi's on that arrest in San Diego. It would've been easy to surveil. We would have learned more information. People who watch this. Oh it's hindsight 20 20. No I'm not talking hindsight 2020. I'm talking basic logical investigation. Again the FBI chronology compiled after the 9/11 attacks describes precisely how Almihdhar and Alhazmi begin training for their 9/11

operation. April 4th 2000 Nawaf Alhazmi received one introductory flight instruction from the National Air college located at thirty seven sixty Glenn Curtiss road San Diego on May 4th Khalid Almihdhar debit card purchase two Jepsen training kits the June 10 2000 Almihdhar the parts the U.S. spy a Lifton's of flight for 7 for Los Angeles California to Frankfurt Germany. Khalid Almihdhar is heading home to see a newborn son for the next 13 months he will live with his wife and baby in the house in Yemen. The

house NSA is monitoring he will even apply for a new U.S. visa. And incredibly he will get it. December 8th 2000. Hani Hanjour another 9/11 hijacker touches down in San Diego three days later. He joins Nawaf Alhazmi on a road trip to New Jersey where the rest of the hijackers are assembling. Once more the FBI chronology compiled after the attacks documents their five month trip. March 1st 2001 has eight hours of simulator training at. April 1st Najaf has received a speeding ticket to receive a summons for failure to wear his seatbelt May 1st. Hazmi filed a police report at the Fairfax County Virginia Police Department alleging he was mugged by an unknown black

June 21st 2001. A reporter from the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation interviewed bin Laden's lieutenants in Afghanistan. They hint that a major attack may soon take place. U.S. forces in the Mideast are put on the highest alert after the interview is released. Essay's traffic analysis detects a huge spike of threatening communications. There was a great anticipation that there was going to be an attack on U.S. interests by al Qaeda. Most people believed it was going to be overseas and so tragically their focus was on their job which was looking overseas and not so much on what was happening in the U.S. which they viewed as the FBI job as a chronology goes on July 4th 2001 Almihdhar entered U.S. Saudi Arabian flight 53 via JFK in New York City using a B-1 business visa listing his tendered address at the Marriott

Hotel in New York City. That was the Marriott Hotel at the World Trade Center to make final preparations for their attack Alhazmi Almihdhar and Honduras drive south on the New Jersey Turnpike they avoid staying in large cities they avoid hotel chains with computerized registration. Instead the crew drives into the Maryland town of moral and checks into the low budget Valencia Motel. By now they have their final assignment targeting the Pentagon throughout their whole journey whether they were in San Diego or they were in New Jersey or they were in Laurel Maryland. They were communicating back and forth to the bin Laden ops center in Yemen.

NSA was listening in on the ups and recording the conversations and then transcribing for the NSA never learned any other agency that the terrorists were in the United States and moving across the country towards Washington. On the face of it Laurel Maryland looks like a typical Washington suburb. What's very different is that this town happens to be right next door to NSA headquarters. While NSA has detected a spike in communications threatening an imminent attack. Bin Laden's hit men have taken refuge right in their own backyard. August 18. Hani Hanjour rented a number four 3:3 the day before the hijack. Off Hazmi Wal-Mart thirty six sixty five food

factory Khalid Almihdhar 9 6 2001 Nawaf Alhazmi Khalid Almihdhar Hani Hanjour Gold's Gym Greenbelt Maryland. The hijackers seemed to blend in very well even when they shop for improvised weapons for the hijackings. They shopped in a Target store just down the street from NSA. No one thought what they were doing was suspicious. So here you have these two groups of people. One the terrorists who are plotting the largest terrorist operation in U.S. history and you have NSA which have been listening to some of their phone calls for years and now they're living side by side. Neither of them knowing that the other is there. What was really tragic is that if General Hayden had looked at his eighth floor window west

toward Florida just two miles away he could have almost seen the motel in which the hijackers were living. I mean it's one of the biggest ironies in the history of American intelligence. On the day of the 9/11 attacks most of NSA employees are ordered to leave their headquarters afraid that NSA might be another target. Some of the few who remain moved from their upstairs offices to lower floors. Others tack up black curtains to block their windows. They seem to have no idea what their own agency and the CIA both knew but had said nothing about

Had we been able to realize how significant that was. Put it together and get it to the agencies who could have made use of it in time when there had been a different end to the 9/11 story. I can't come up with a rational reason why I didn't break the rules. Pick up the phone and tell the hijackers or really bad guys are in the US and I don't know if I'll ever be able to come to terms with that. I don't know. I really don't know. On the 13th of September I gave an address to an empty room that we beamed it throughout our entire enterprise about free people is always having to decide the balance of securing our liberty. And I told the workforce there can be a lot of pressures to push that banner down to our security and our job at

NSA was to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again. Those pressures aren't long in coming when Hayden is asked by Vice President Cheney what more NSA can do. He answers not much without breaking laws the laws that force NSA to obtain a warrant to listen in on Americans. Three weeks after the attacks President Bush bypasses those laws by secretly issuing an executive order NSA will no longer have to worry about obtaining warrants to eavesdrop inside America. If 9/11 was a wakeup call the response is a license to listen to almost anything and everything. And part of that wakeup call certainly right after 9/11 including the fact that you needed to take some strict measures you

needed to take some action that would allow you to not let that happen again. But to make the new program work Hayden must finally bring the National Security Agency into the modern age the backbone of global communications had moved from easily intercepted satellite signals in space to fiber optic cables buried under the ocean. To understand the challenge NSA faces Nova follows one e-mail message as it circles the globe in Malaysia's capital city of Kuala Lumpur. James Bamford is researching al Qaeda's communications network in a busy cafe. He typed out an e-mail message to Nova's producers in Boston

Bamford's message is harmless but contains the kinds of key words and phrases that NSA super computers are programmed to detect. Phrases like blow up the Whitehouse destroy the Capitol building biological warfare when he presses send Bamford's message is instantly mixed in with dozens of other messages on the same wireless network then routed to a large telecommunications center in the city. Their voice calls are converted from analog to digital signals and streamed as pulses of light through a fiber optic cable that dives into the South China Sea off Malaysia's coast. Along the way Bamford's message is merged with thousands of phone calls emails and faxes in dozens of languages from hundreds of Asian

cities. The jumble of data crosses under the Pacific Ocean at the speed of light. Just five hundred of a second after the message was sent. He comes ashore six feet under this lonely stretch of California beach near Morro Bay there beneath screeching goals and surfers in wetsuits. Asian communications premier a few miles inland. The message passes through a small nondescript building near San Luis Obispo. If you want to tap into international communications it seems like the perfect place is San Luis Obispo. That's where 80 percent of all communications from Asia enter the United States.

But under NSA new orders they don't tap in here. Instead the cables run straight from San Luis Obispo to a building in San Francisco. The building at 6:11 Folsom Street is AT&T regional switching center all the international traffic snakes up to the seventh floor. And it is here that a crucial change takes place on the seventh floor is also where AT&T is domestic traffic is routed a cacophony of millions of conversations cries and laughter hopes and dreams. Emails faxes bank statements hotel reservations love poems and death notices all sent by people from inside the United States. The

only thing they have in common is a reasonable expectation of privacy. In 2003 an AT&T engineer notices that the cables on the seventh floor had been rerouted and a mirror image of all the traffic both domestic and international is now being sent to a secret room. One floor below. It was obvious that this was some kind of NSA installation. I figured out that what they were doing was a blind wholesale copying of the entire Internet data flow and this meant randomly scooping up huge amounts of purely domestic data as well as international data. When I hear the word wiretap I've always imagined some person in a trench coat and a black hat and sunglasses skulking around after dark secretly tapping into a wire and hoping that no one notices that what they've done in that facility is

my full light of day. They cut the fiber optic cables and then reconnect them in a splitter. What they have built is a facility that is capable of monitoring absolutely all data communication through it. Brian Reed a communications expert has examined AT&T internal documents that Klein provided they show that the secret room contains electronic equipment specifically designed for signals intelligence equipment programmed to sift through millions of messages searching for keywords like the ones Bamford sent from Kuala Lumpur. The most curious piece of equipment in that room is the completely flexible monitoring system that can be told on a moment's notice. Please monitor all conversation that contains the word Humming-Bird. Please monitor all conversation that goes to Mobile Alabama. Please monitor all conversations that contain both the word Humming-Bird and go to Mobile Alabama.

NSA has turned its giant ear to listen in on America. Based on everything I know I believe that there are between 15 and 30 of these secret rooms around the US. The post-9 11 rules authorized NSA to listen in to Americans both inside and outside the US without any special court approval. After 9/11 we were essentially in charge of a new system which intercepted satellite phone communications in Iraq and Afghanistan and surrounding areas calls and data from the Middle East and North Africa are collected and relayed to a listening post tucked in the hills outside Augusta Georgia as a voice interceptor. Adrian Kinny listened to some of those calls assigned by the army to NSA. She was

called back to active duty after 9/11 for a voice intercept her computer system would essentially pop up and be buried somewhere. I would say to my teams where you could just go through and click on various conversations and it would have the phone number the time up time down there. And we were told that we were to listen to all conversations that were intercepted to include Americans and other allied countries. Some of those conversations are personal some even intimate and there was no directive to say when you had conversations like this come through with it you should delete them. That's what we did when I was on active duty in 1949. We would never collect on an American I had a real problem with the fact that people were listening to it and I was listening to that time and after that voice interceptor is spending listening to

conversations in the States. It's time that they can span looking or listening for actual conversations related to terrorist organizations as NSA began tapping into fiber optic cables as well as satellites information began to flood in like never before. According to a congressional study in 2008 some intelligence data sources grow at a rate of 4 bytes. That's four trillion bytes per month the equivalent of twelve filing cabinets of new information for every American citizen every year. But what does it all mean. Computers today tell people what things are. Here's some data that you asked for. They don't tell you what it means. So there is some work going on to try to marry the power of computers to the power of humans. Specialized software

can help extract important information based on context and meaning. Dr. Robert L. Popper does advanced research on these kinds of programs known as classifiers. I'm gonna say you wanted to build a classifier for al Qaeda. The term the concept of al Qaeda the way it would work is you as an analyst would go find all these documents whether they're e-mails or things on the web or whatever but all these documents that in your judgment are narratives associated with the concept of al Qaeda in the future by refining the software and harnessing enough computing power. These classifiers could potentially reduce the mountain of information human analysts have to examine. So the next frontier may be computer. Do you see any unusual associations that I didn't think to ask you about that I ought to have

asked you about when it relates to a threat against the homeland. But most experts agree that may take decades and it could only help mine information in documents e-mails and faxes. When it comes to human conversations technology is of little help. It still takes people wearing headphones and listening in. I decided a couple of weeks after 9/11 to enlist and go to Arabic and I hope to go hunt Osama. At that time David Murphy Falke was one of the thousands of new linguists trained to work in the trenches of NSA signals intelligence operations NSA spends literally billions of dollars to obtain signals to process them move them from place to place without people knowing

to get them to an end user a translator who can make some sense of them and write up a transcription. What I found was a large number of translators simply not meeting minimal requirements in language skills basically running very expensive very complicated equipment without the kind of knowledge or context that they would need to do that properly. Before 9/11 the budget for U.S. intelligence was twenty six point seven billion dollars by 2008. That budget nearly doubled and essay's portion is secret but believed to be over a third more than the Departments of Treasury interior or labor. Its ranks have swelled to over 35000. Given all the additional money spent now on rebuilding the intelligence

community and its capabilities are we really safer as a nation. I think generally for me the answer is yes. The fact that we haven't had another attack the fact that we have better coordination and better information sharing. Are we to the point where we can relax and put our guard down. No I think if we do then we run the risk of changing the answer. It's very very hard to draw a hard and fast line between where foreign intelligence stops and domestic intelligence starts. That doesn't mean that we let our foreign intelligence agencies on every street corner in America. But it does mean that you have to have very good communication and coordination between the foreign intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA and our domestic agencies like the FBI because if you don't things are going to slip between the cracks and that's exactly what happened with 9/11

the problem with reporting on a story like this is that you're really searching in the dark. There's no way to sit on the outside and really know what's going on on the inside and without an official inquiry. Some questions can't be answered. Why did the NSA fail to act or pass on information that could have warned of 9/11. Why didn't it share information with the CIA and FBI that could possibly have stopped the plot. As for the question of whether we are any safer now than we were before we should have been safe the way it was as a head all the information it needed to stop the hijackers. And it already had laws that allowed it to track them. So now with these new rules with all the money spent with all the data

collects is NSA doing a better job. Or is this just that much harder. Because it's just being flooded with data. How much information is enough and too much information end up making the world more dangerous. Nova's spy factory Web site. Dig deeper into this topic with original content including interactive interviews and more like it on PBS Tuesdays and my flight nights on NOVA. Can scientific detectives uncover the stories of missing pilots. They may have survived the shoot down on their plane at the logical secrets behind the world's first

jet missing it make out the. Next time on no. Flight. Tuesdays in July on PBS. Major funding for Nova is provided by the following natural gas is a cleaner burning fuel. Get a lot of natural gas has impurities like CO2 in a controlled free zone is a new technology being developed by ExxonMobil to remove the CO2 from the natural gas so we can safely store where he won't get into the atmosphere. ExxonMobil is spending more than a hundred million dollars to build a plant that will demonstrate this process. I'm very optimistic about it because this technology could be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly. And by the civic life the power to help you succeed. Offer insurance a new reason investments. And David H. Koch. And. Discovering you know. It. Takes.

Time. And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And by PBS viewers like you. Thank you. This Nova program is available on DVD. The companion book The Shadow Factory

is also available to order. Visit PBS dot org. Or call us at 1 800 PBS. PBS