Auhor & Former Intelligence Analyst James Bamford 's Special to the Intercept

The tone of the answering machine message was routine, like a reminder for a dental appointment. But there was also an undercurrent of urgency. “Please call me back,” the voice said. “It’s important.”

What worried me was who was calling: a senior attorney with the Justice Department’s secretive Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. By the time I hung up the payphone at a little coffee shop in Cambridge, Mass., and wandered back to my table, strewn with yellow legal pads and dog-eared documents, I had guessed what he was after: my copy of the Justice Department’s top-secret criminal file on the National Security Agency. Only two copies of the original were ever made. Now I had to find a way to get it out of the country—fast.

[...]

Not only did the classified file from the Justice Department accuse the NSA of systematically breaking the law by eavesdropping on American citizens, it concluded that it was impossible to prosecute those running the agency because of the enormous secrecy that enveloped it. Worse, the file made clear that the NSA itself was effectively beyond the law—allowed to bypass statutes passed by Congress and follow its own super-classified charter, what the agency called a “top-secret birth certificate” drawn up by the White House decades earlier.

  James Bamford: The Intercept

This is a great article about the shady beginnings of, the strict secrecy and illegal activity of the NSA and how James Bamford came to write about the organization.

Read the rest here: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/02/the-nsa-and-me/

And as a special treat, The Intercept has published in this article James Bamford's copy of the investigative file on the NSA that the agency so desperately wanted to keep secret.

The solution is not to jail the whistleblowers, or to question the patriotism of those who tell their stories, but to do what Attorney General Edward Levi courageously attempted to do more than a third of a century ago – to have the criminal division of the Justice Department conduct a thorough investigation, and then to prosecute any member of the intelligence community who has broken the law, whether by illegally spying on Americans or by lying to Congress.

I would be happy to lend my copy of the NSA’s criminal file to Attorney General Eric Holder, if he would like to see how to begin. Or he can read it here.