NOVA | NOVA Investigates the NSA
u7kZhTjjYyY • 2009-01-16
Transcript preview
Open
Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
halfway between Baltimore and Washington
DC is a hidden
city the headquarters of the National
Security Agency
NSA here tens of thousands of
mathematicians computer scientists
analysts linguists and Voice
interceptors work in absolute secrecy
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 never say anything
nsa's 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 attack
it's a question that has never been
thoroughly investigated none of this
information that we're speaking about
this evening is in the 911 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 alerted any other
agent
that the terrorists were in the United
States and moving across the country
towards
Washington since the 9/11 attacks nsa'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 of Americans and
it's almost like going through and
finding somebody's diary but is this
flood of information making America any
safer
looking in to the Spy
Factory on Nova coming February 3rd to
most PBS
stations
Resume
Read
file updated 2026-02-13 12:55:22 UTC
Categories
Manage