Chatter

Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping

By: Patrick Radden Keefe

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

How does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on? And is the interception of communication an effective means of predicting and preventing future attacks? These are some of the questions at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant new book, Chatter.

In the late 1990s, when Keefe was a graduate student in England, he heard stories about an eavesdropping network led by the United States that spanned the planet. The system, known as Echelon, allowed America and its allies to intercept the private phone calls and e-mails of civilians and governments around the world. Taking the mystery of Echelon as his point of departure, Keefe explores the nature and context of communications interception, drawing together fascinating strands of history, fresh investigative reporting, and riveting, eye-opening anecdotes. The result is a bold and distinctive book, part detective story, part travel-writing, part essay on paranoia and secrecy in a digital age.

Chatter starts out at Menwith Hill, a secret eavesdropping station covered in mysterious, gargantuan golf balls, in England’s Yorkshire moors. From there, the narrative moves quickly to another American spy station hidden in the Australian outback; from the intelligence bureaucracy in Washington to the European Parliament in Brussels; from an abandoned National Security Agency base in the mountains of North Carolina to the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

As Keefe chases down the truth of contemporary surveillance by intelligence agencies, he unearths reams of little-known information and introduces us to a rogue’s gallery of unforgettable characters. We meet a former British eavesdropper who now listens in on the United States Air Force for sport; an intelligence translator who risked prison to reveal an American operation to spy on the United Nations Security Council; a former member of the Senate committee on intelligence who says that oversight is so bad, a lot of senators only sit on the committee for the travel.

Provocative, often funny, and alarming without being alarmist, Chatter is a journey through a bizarre and shadowy world with vast implications for our security as well as our privacy. It is also the debut of a major new voice in nonfiction.

Eye Opening & Interesting

Would you listen to Chatter again? Why?

Yes and I will probably will. There is a lot to take in. I often found myself jotting down notes of interesting things to look into later.

What did you like best about this story?

Learning about the cooperative intelligence program between the US and the UK, WWII-era intelligence, and the transition between pre-9/11 to post-9/11. Mixed in all of that are all these anecdotes of folks who were there along the way.

Would you listen to another book narrated by Robertson Dean?

Yes, he came off a little stilted at times but it made the subject matter clear and easy to listen to.

Limited Intelligence

A thoroughly fascinating history of SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) as invented and practiced by the security agencies of the five major English-speaking nations after WWII.

With the ability to capture every phone call and email message in the world, the Echelon surveillance system is run by the super-secret NSA which must then rely on sophisticated computer software to cull and filter the terabytes of data retrieved daily. After that, it is up to human intelligence analysts to give meaning or alert to the thousands of messages received.

And this is where Echelon has failed since its inception.

'Chatter' documents the politics and policies of institutions so infatuated with technology that they have all but ignored the fact that it still takes human beings to interpret the intelligence being gathered.

The inept and ineffectual operations of our intelligence agencies led in good measure to the tragedy on 9/11 and this book outlines reasons for those failures.

Intelligence is a nether world that lies just under the surface of our high-tech society, and when directed by politicians to advance their own ideologies and agenda, can be highly detrimental to the security of a nation. We only have to look at how Vice President Cheney allegedly coerced the CIA to "cook the books" on how many WMD's existed in Iraq to make a case for a war that has claimed far too many lives and has greatly increased the dangers of terrorism in the world.

'Chatter' is a thoroughly researched cautionary tale that sheds important light on an area of government that has always existed in the dark.

Click on the light and find out for yourself what all the chatter is about.

Just Okay

I'm a huge fan of Patrick Radden Keefe and have read all of his books. This one just didn't grab me like his others have, but I'd chalk it up to this being his earlier work. If you've not listened to his other books, I cannot POSSIBLY recommend them enough!

Worth your time.

This is a really solid introduction to a topic I knew almost nothing about. If you want to learn something substantive about Signals Intelligence (electronic evesdropping) in an utterly painless way, this is a great download.

It's pretty well-written, and although it meanders about at times, by the time it's all done, you've had a very broad exposure to the topic.

The author here is not some privacy zealot out to do a hatchet job on the NSA. Rather, he seems to approach his topic with a genuine sense of intellectual curiousity and an understanding of the inherent trade-offs between privacy and security interests. But what emerges from this fair and frank analysis of the available information is no less troubling.

If you are concerned about your personal privacy, this book shows you have every reason to be justified in those concerns. If you aren't particularly concerned about privacy and just hope our spys manage to find a way to stay ahead of the bad guys and head off the next 9/11, you should also be very concerned about what this book has to say about the effectiveness of U.S. evesdropping capabilities.

The picture that emerges here is that of a traditional, hide-bound government bureaucracy, unable to adapt to the changes in modern communication, rather than the all-seeing, all powerful, Great Eye of the U.S. that some would have us fear.

Yet at the same time, this very bureaucracy is almost completely shielded by secrecy, and still possesses incredible power to invade our privacy, both at home and overseas.

We may have the worst of all possible worlds: an ineffective NSA that often can't actually find the bad guys, spends billions of our dollars, possesses powerful tools for the invasion of our privacy, and has been basically left to its own devices.

The book not only shows you these problems, it also gives you enough exposure to the field to understand why they all are going to be very difficult to solve.

A Must Read for 2006 Survival

During early 2006, it became clear that political forces exploiting the technical collection capabilities of the NSA have been at work for a long time monitoring citizens of the US.

This book is a "Survival Must Read" whatever your political affiliation or level of understanding. Too few Americans grasp the incredible technology capable of intruding into their personal privacy. Our basic thoughts regarding Privacy and Constitutional Rights are ill-formed at best. Perhaps we trust the political process too much? Maybe or perhaps we are just unaware.

Patrick Keefe has written a remarkably well articulated and politically neutral documentary. This excellent work will help the reader/listener understand technical collection (SIGINT), aka 'evesdropping' from beginning to end. More importantly, Mr. Keefe explores the political, constitutional and moral implications to such a superb degree, that the reader becomes empowered to form his/her own opinions in a well developed and mature manner.

If you want to survive the spin regarding the NSA and associated political monkey-business, this book is a "Must Read".