The NSA Is It’s Own Worst Enemy

There has been no journalist that has been more effective in penetrating the self-serving secrecy of the NSA and the security state than James Bamford, the Emmy-nominated filmmaker and best-selling author. He joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to discuss his latest book, Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence. While Bamford has engaged in his share of muckraking on the NSA in his previous works, his new book focuses on an even more pernicious aspect of the intelligence apparatus: their carelessness in allowing foreign governments access to some of our own government’s most treacherous cyberwar creations.

While the government often likes to claim people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are the dangerous actors in revealing the inner workings of the U.S. security state, Bamford’s journalism exposes the irony in shifting the blame. Nefarious surveillance and military equipment has been co-opted by foreign governments by way of the NSA yet not much has been done about it. “[T]here's all this effort to silence whistleblowers when there is no effort to really stop foreign countries from accessing the material that NSA has and then… use it against American citizens,” Bamford said.

Bamford specifically highlights Israel as one of those foreign powers and that might explain the limited mainstream attention given to this latest book. He explores the multi-faceted relationship Israel has to the U.S. with regard to lobbying, Hollywood and espionage. Bamford explained, “Israel has been spying in the United States for a long time and it's been not only not written about, but it hasn't been prosecuted and that's one of the problems.” Names like Arnon Milchan—the Hollywood producer, Israeli spy and Robert De Niro confidant—also came up as an example of someone who has engaged in committing espionage in the U.S. yet has faced no repercussions. Despite his hand in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, being an arms dealer and propagandizing it in the U.S., justice never seems to reach him, Bamford said.