Here's an excerpt from the review: The bad news is that Big Brother really is watching. The worse news is that Big Brother often listens in on the wrong people and sometimes fails to recognize critical information, like the fact that terrorists are gathering and plotting an attack. When it does find a critical nugget like that, it occasionally files it away somewhere and doesn’t tell anybody. ...

In brisk and colorful narrative, The Shadow Factory details the agency’s failure on Sept. 11 ... . Bamford whisks the reader through the NSA’s embarrassing failure to figure out that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and through the distressing post-Sept. 11 years when the agency demonstrated both technical gee-whizzery and brash law-breaking.

The book is certain to raise questions about whether the NSA, with headquarters in those huge, foreboding structures just off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway on Fort Meade Road, ever can operate effectively and efficiently — and legally.