… who looks after things.
It was quite beautiful. Several acapella groups sang.
There was an intimacy. Was I intruding by being there?
But the message is for the world:
I’ve never known when it wasn’t this way.
I had forgotten that it doesn’t have to be this way.
It doesn’t. We must change it.
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TeenAIDS.org is having a two day symposium webcast live. Day Two [today] is being webcast from Harvard. Curiously, they rented a satellite truck rather than use Harvard’s net. I’m guessing they understand institutional sociodynamics. Put that in your Berkman Center and decrypt it.
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The number of people who died from AIDS since November 26, 2007:
17,333 [taken 2:30 PM Novmber 28, 2007]. Robert Wilson’s
Toplogical III behind it. Science Center, North Yard.
I was living in New York City1 when it broke out2. It was “a gay disease” at the time. The wrath of God? Or act of man? In any case, it is a “gay disease” no longer. Especially not in Africa where it is much more prevalent than the U.S. The American gay community organized for the medical community to search for a cure and organized to promote safe sex practices especially in their own community. Research has not found a cure. It has found lots of things that help a little and some things that help some. The latter are quite expensive. Lives can be prolonged in America, but not in Africa. The gay activists bemoan the resurgence of AIDS in their midst. Their fellows have grown tired of being careful.
That’s the situation as I understand it, but then I haven’t been following the pandemic anything like carefully. Perhaps not having had a date in this Millenium has made me feel immune. Or perhaps newer shocks have pushed out the old.
The good news is that Harvard is gearing up to celebrate World AIDS Day. Included, the lighting of:
They have related events schedule for slightly more than a month. I’ll try to get links.
1I lived on the Bowery a few steps from Delancy Street at the time, but I was homeful. I shared a loft with my college friend Beriau.
2That is, the “official” Center for Disease Control outbreak.
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Still at it and canvasing Harvard Square.
Dan canvasing for GreenPeace in Harvard Square. Harvard’s third
oldest building, Wadsworth House is in the background.
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WikiLeaks went live again. No evidence of foul play has appeared. No explanation of the the outage has been offered either, but the TOR Project did release a new version and the release note admitted that the previous version had a bug which would cause servers to be down for hours at a time.1
WikiLeaks returned with an “open source”2 article analyzing the contents of the Guantanamo document leaked through the site earlier. Stephen Soldz of Psychologists for an Ethical APA finds further evidence of complicity between APA psychologists and Pentagon sponsored torture. |
1I apologize for taking so long to follow up. I should have “unwarranted” this rumor sooner.
2The intelligence community has adopted this phrase to describe gathering intelligence from sources that are not restricted. In this case, the “value added” is “connecting the dots” that are otherwise out in the open.
Guantánamo Bay Camp Delta Map from leaked military manual.
Courtesy WikiLeaks.org
Wired Magazine reported yesterday that:
A never-before-seen military manual detailing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military’s Guantánamo Bay detention facility has been leaked to the web, affording a rare inside glimpse into the institution where the United States has imprisoned hundreds of suspected terrorists since 2002.
The document was leaked through an “anonymized” Wiki site called WikiLeaks.org. The Wikipedia page for it notes that sometime since the leak the site “has become inaccessible”. I first heard of this from Rachel Maddow and discovered that the main site was inaccessible. I assumed Rachel had slasdoted the site, but this morning still no go. I tried several of the regional WikiLeaks sites listed on the Wikipedia page to no avail. If WikiLeaks has been the target of BlackOps, how did THEY get widely separated servers?1
WikiLeaks used the software from WikiMedia Foundation for assembling and presenting information and the The Onion Router to provide anonymity to whistleblowers.
As of 19:20 UTC Thursday Novermber 15, 2007 these sites all are inaccessible:
1I suppose a Domain Name Server attack might make all the WikiLeaks sites “inaccessible” if, like me, you don’t know any of the IP addresses. If true, a possible countermeasure might be for a number of “above ground” friendlies to post IP addresses to the net – an alternate DNS.
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Iranians for Peace and Justice [awesome site] on Boston Common 10/27/07.
Thursday, November 15th, 7:00 – 9:15 pm at
Cambridge YMCA, 820 Mass. Ave. Central Square [Note Change in Location especially DotPeace.]
The forum will feature a panel with Paula Gutlove and Gordon Thompson, who co-convene the US-Iran Working Group on Health Science Cooperation and recently led a health diplomacy mission to Iran, Kaveh Afrasiabi, an Iran expert and Professor of International Relations at Bentley College and Anne Miller, New Hampshire Peace Action director, who visited Iran in 2006 as part of a “peace between peoples” delegation and is organizing on peace issues for the presidential primaries. Following brief presentations, there will be time for questions, information sharing with local peace and justice groups and brainstorming ways to respond.
The forum is sponsored by AFSC, Cambridge Peace Commission, Mass. Peace Action, IPPNW/PSR1, Cambridge UJP, WILPF, Middle East Crisis Coalition2 and Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace.
For more information, people can contact the Cambridge Peace Commission at peace@cambridgema.gov 617-349-4694 or Mass. Peace Action www.masspeaceaction.org 617-354-2169
1International Physicians for the Prevention of War [Google translate]
2Their page is parked. I tried.
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Representative Dennis Kucinich today introduced a “priveleged resolution” H. Res. 7991 to impeach Ricard B. Cheney. It is essentially the same as his previous motion to impeach H. Res. 3332 which was blocked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A privileged motion, if not tabled or referred, must be debated and voted upon. House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer [D. Maryland] introduced a motion to table, but the Republicans voted it down! The fifteen minute vote lasted an hour and five minutes with many Republicans who had initially voted to table changing their votes. [Brent Budowsky thinks they may have outsmarted themselves.] Eventually some Democrats who had initially voted to table followed suit. The House voted 218-194 on Steny Hoyer’s motion to refer to the Judiciary Committee.
The corporate media take the view that this is a campaign stunt that has no chance of further action. The referral to House Judiciary, in their view, amounts to killing it. But polls indicate that 54% of the American people favor impeachment. Many municipalities have passed impeachment resolutions. Needless to say, “alternative media” have a different view. Bradblog has a “waffling” statement from John Conyers. “Waffling” is in his view, better than “not on the table.” Paul Reickhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told Rachel Maddow that “this story has legs.” AfterDowningStreet.org, who sponsor ImpeachCheney, view it as a hopeful sign and a cause for action. If you would like to have your name read into the Congressional record, check them out.
1Full text from the Library of Congress. It’s easier to read than the text on Kucinich’s website. Note that resolutions [H. Res.] and bills [H.R.] have separate numbering schemes.
2Full text from the Library of Congress. An easier to read slightly polished version of the full text by Mathew Cardinale of the Atlanta Progressive News. An easy way to compare 333 and 799 is to open them in adjacent tabs and align them vertically. Flipping tabs will cause differences to appear as “motion”.
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The nomination of Michael Mukasey to replace Torture Alum Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee 11-8. It now goes to the full Senate.
Coalition member demands “Habeas Now!”.
University Hall April 26, 2007.
Photo: Harvard Anti-Torture Coalition
When Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey was asked if he would condemn the use of waterboarding1, he sounded a lot like portly Sargent Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes, “I know nothing, nothing.” The Harvard Anti-Torture Coalition, who did some very fine work busting Torture Alum Alberto Gonzales , reacted, “We Drown in Silence“. But they came up fighting last Friday, urging us to call our Senators to oppose the nomination. They provide phone numbers. There is still time, since the Senate Judiciary Committee vote is tomorrow Nov. 6. Pundits believe that the chances of stopping the nomination in Committee are much better than stopping it on the floor of the full Senate.
John Nichols, who writes for the Nation and the Capitol Times, says that over the weekend U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold launched a new campaign to block approval of the nomination.
2Note the Post-Orwellian locution for “prisoner” and “torture”.
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I’m very late in reporting on my field trip to D.C.1 and the first annual teach-in “Confronting the Global Triple Crisis – Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction” and nearly missed my opportunity to pump up the National Day of Climate Action. But if you are already convinced or even just curious y’all come
Saturday November 3, 2007.
For the Boston folks a few possibilities:
8:45 AM Cambridge City Hall – “Walk for a Climate Revolution” arriving at St. Paul’s Cathedral (near Park St T) at:
10:30 AM St. Paul’s Cathedral (near Park St T) – “The BIG One” will conclude about 12:00 N with a send off for the:
12:00 N St. Paul’s Cathedral (near Park St T) – “Revolutionary Ride” stopping at Alewife T station @ 1:00 PM then on to Concord. You CAN take a bike on the Red Line 🙂 .
Otherwise follow the “Join an Action” link on the Step It Up 2007 website.
For the “my revolutionary fervor is bigger than yours” crowd, I will simply point out that Bill Mckibben, who organized this and the first one last year, caught some tear gas at the WTO demonstration a while back. Can a former Crimson President have street cred? Darfur, by the way, is about oil, imperialism, AND global warming.2
1by carbon friendly public transportation.
2IOU a cite.
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More to come.
More to come. Reports are starting to come in to the National Site.
The decision to do regional rallies rather than one big one in Washington, is in my opinion, a good one. For one thing, it makes it possible for more people to reach their demonstration by ground. October 27, 2007 was an anti-war demonstration with a good carbon footprint.1 There probably was a greater number of people at the 11 regional rallies than could have gone to DC. But how to maximize the benefit of those greater numbers? Keep those action reports and blogs coming. Frank Capra didn’t know from internet.
1In fact, per capita, much better than the No War, No Warming demonstration the week before, but with a focus on civil disobedience, it kinda had to be in one place – at least at this point in time. And with a much smaller number of people their carbon footprint was not bad.
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I think it’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.
[It’s a link. I couldn’t get embed to work with WordPress.
Then again, I didn’t try all that hard.]
One of eleven regional demonstrations [includes a video by Robert Greenwald].
Medea Benjamin is scheduled to be in Boston. I hope she remembers to not get arrested on Friday. She wil, no doubt, be taking relatively carbon friendly transport being on the “no-fly” list and all.
Μήδεια at the State of the Union 2007 Protest. [Photo: Wikimedia]
For What It’s Worth II, III, IV, V, VI, Wikipedia.
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Separate Oil & State [Photo No War, No Warming. Click Pic for Flickr pix.]
More from Indymedia.
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Bill McKibben was the first to make me aware that the importance of access to a vast store of low entropy carbon, is often undersold in describing the rise of capitalism. Normally, the Protestant ethic and/or Yankee ingenuity is center stage. The primeval ferns, having slowly but relentlessly done work against the second law of thermodynamics for millions of years, are just stage dressing. Fossil fuels look like lifeless ooze and/or rocks, but it has one essential property due to the action of life – the ability to progress to lower entropy state. This biogeological piggy bank has made a huge contribution to the rise of capitalism. Unfortunately, it has led to enormous as yet unaccounted costs of production.2 One of these mega-externalities is the release of Carbon Dioxide and the consequent global warming. The crisis over ownership of low entropy carbon, predicted in the early ’70’s1, is well upon us. The Carbon Wars of Acquisition are here, but are we facing Carbon Wars of Ejection – social dislocation due to global warming? You might check in with Bill McKibben.
This is Head of the Charles weekend and the Yard is posted with security regulations. Among them that access to the Houses, which includes Adams, will be restricted. I would be remiss, if I did not point out that Harvard’s Law Enforcement Community would like non-Harvard people to be the guest of a Harvard student. There will be other chances to see him. And I will be reporting on my trip to the First Annual:
1James Ridgeway, The Last Play: The Struggle to Monopolize the World’s Energy Resources, Mentor/New American Library 1974.
2It has also had deleterious effects on economic theory by encouraging the erroneous assumption that the human econosphere is unbounded. It is potentially unbounded in an astrophysical sense, but there is a very large investment barrier presented by the gravitational well of the earth that makes states outside it effectively inaccessible on a time scale comparable to the global warming crisis.
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Forgive the Drudgism. Obviously, most of the world would prefer the U.S. not bomb Iran. There are of course exceptions. As for the American People, it’s hard to tell. They clearly want out of Iraq, which is in part why the administration needs to hang violence in Iraq on Iranian heads. But as Bush paraphrases the old African Proverb, “You fool me once shame on you. You fool me … you can’t get fooled again.”1 Here, The Newshoggers mirror the claim by the UK’s Daily Telegraph that SecDef2 Robert Gates is replacing a disabled Condi Rice as the administrations voice of restraint. Given the reports of discontent in the top ranks of the military. It may be true.
1As I understand it, the African Proverb says,”You fool me once. shame on you. You fool me twice, shame on me.” I can’t confirm that this is actually an African Proverb or where in Africa it is believed to have originated. Google is not the obvious way to find out. I think asking a human is the way to go. “You can’t get fooled again,” is from England, i.e. The Who. Or for the monolingual, like me, the English Wikipedia Page. Apparently, the Dutch speaking world links to their page more often the English speaking world.
2The military name for the position once known as Secretary of War. This was well before the understanding that “defense” means maintaining the permanent ability to fight two and half simultaneous wars.
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Pulitzer1 winner Seymour Hersh published Shifting Targets in the New Yorker on Sunday.2 The article details the shifting of targets from the broader “all possible nuclear installations throughout Iran” to the narrower “installations of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.” Since the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment makes the Guard terrorists, this is a shift from ‘preventing’ nuclear proliferation to ‘fighting terrorism’. It is a shift over a period of months within Iran. You might have thought Sy meant shifting the target from Iraq to Iran. That shift is on a larger scale in space and time3, but I’m sure Sy wanted you to think about that too.
About 20 minutes of this morning’s Democracy Now! is with Sy as well as clips of Too Much Cappucino Ferino claiming that Bush is pursuing every possible diplomatic avenue JUST AS HE DID WITH IRAQ!
1Sy won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for exposing the massacre by U.S. Armed Forces of over 300 [and possibly as many as 500] unarmed civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
2I was off the net, looking in people’s book bags.
3One of the joys of having studied condensed matter physics – thermodynamics and kinetic theory specifically – is the idea the theories are often incomplete. When they are, knowing the scale on which the apply is important. Stronger theories often contain multiple scales with a definite relationship between them. (|Neo) Classical Economics has the significant flaw, that while the sphere of effective economic activity has definite scales, the theory does not. My proposal to President Drew, require the economists to study Kinetic Theory, before they claim to be emulating Physics. The sociologists are much less brazen.
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Photo: David Schankbone, Wikimedia
The war in Iraq isn’t going to expand tenfold overnight. By simply doing nothing, the Democrats can rest assured that Bush’s bad policy will simply keep failing. War with Iran, on the other hand, can still be prevented.
Major Scott Ritter USMC [Retired.] truthdig.org
My brother is a sailor1. It took him three tries to get himself to Viet Nam. I filed for Conscientious Objector, but lotteried out. During Christmas Break 1991 we talked about the impending war with Iraq. I told him that we would be lucky if it came out as well as Viet Nam. It looked, for a bit, like I might be wrong, but in the span of time, it appears I was right. I am a bit like Cassandra.
The sailors refer to the Marines as Jarheads. Marine Lt. Jonathon Kendrick in A Few Good Men, says of the sailors, “We like you boys just fine. Whenever we go somewhere to fight, you boys always give us a ride.” I never thought I would like Jarheads, but then I learned about Major General Smedley Butler who wrote War is a Racket. He’s my fave Jarhead.
I’m working on a third Jarhead. He knows a lot of evolutionary biology. He wonders if we [humanoid carbon units] will ever learn to live together. Or will we extin(ct|guish)2 ourselves. Professor, we need more than wishful thinking from you. As always, I have a seedling of a plan. Think Social Darwinism vs. Evolution of Cooperation.
1 He is officially retired, but he still has to show up now and then.
2This is an example of what computer scientists refer to as a regular expression. It is equivalent to (extinct|extinguish) which means “extinct or extinguish”. Regular expressions obey a Type-3 grammar in the Chomsky Hierarchy.
Former Secretary of the Navy1 and now Senator Jim Webb2 thinks it is. What is Kyl-Lieberman?3 It is an amendment, offered by Senator Jon Kyl and Senator Joe Lieberman, to the 2008 Department of Defense Authorization. As Senator Webb says,
…amendment No. 3017, the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which among other things–and most troubling–would designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The fear, as mentioned below, is that this reclassification of part of the Iranian military might be used by the neocons to justify bombing Iran under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force:
This is not the way to make foreign policy. It is not the way to declare war, although this clearly worded sense of the Congress could be interpreted this way. These who regret their vote 5 years ago to authorize military action in Iraq should think hard before supporting this approach, because, in my view, it has the same potential to do harm where many are seeking to do good.
Or:
This proposal is DICK CHENEY‘s fondest pipe dream. It is not a prescription for success. At best it is a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy. At worst it could be read as a backdoor method of gaining congressional validation for military action without one hearing and without serious debate.
The original version has apparently been rewritten slightly to no good effect. The best reportage is by Carah Ong at Iran Nuclear Watch.
Check out Crooks and Liars and Talking Points Memo.
[More links to come. bbl :)]
1Under Ronald Reagan no less!
2But at least he’s a Democrat which is not much in and of itself, but he did introduce the measure to try to get more time for rest and retraining between combat tours for the troops. It was denouced by the neocons as a “backdoor” way of winding down the war in Iraq.
3The flippant footnote answer is, “the shortest but regrettably cryptic way I could think of to get a quasi-punchy title and still appear to be doing more than recycling persistant internet Bomb Iran rumors.
The offical logo of the Boston Globe on their building on Morrissey
Boulevard, Dorchester, MA [near UMass Mandela and the JFK Library].
Technical augmention is by the StopTheBioLab Coalition.
NIH funded study OK’s NIH “Biodefense” Lab siting.
With the release of the court mandate Final Environmental Impact Report [FEIR]
It is not quite leaving the fox to watch the hen house. It is asking the fox to outsource the watching of the hen house.
The Stop the Biolab Coalition has cases before both the State and Federal Courts. The case with the State was heard by the Supreme Judicial Court on September 5. BU asked for a continuance in the Federal case.
On this 45th anniversary of James Meredith being barred from entering the University of Mississippi, thousands of demonstrators are in Jena, Louisiana to protest the highly questionable prosecutorial conduct of the local DA, one Reed Walters. The story has finally penetrated the conventional media, but Democracy Now! has been on it for some time.
Thursday evening in Harvard Square:
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This is news? Well, the Director of National Intelligence has released a new National Intelligence Estimate.1 It has something that can be taken out of context for pundits of every flavor. So you have a large variance within a single report.2
I would like to offer also the assessment by seven serving military who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which has rightfully inspired voluminous commentary – on the net at least. It is so powerfully written that everyone feels compelled to comment on it. Some even wondered whether soldiers who may not have college degrees could have written it by themselves. I can’t, at the moment, recall anything by a Harvard author of comparable power.3 I submit that the piece has such extraordinary power in part because they did what no one else does. “Write only what you know.”
The piece has seven authors, yet has a clear unanimous voice. I submit these authors have learned lessons that only shared suffering can teach – the suffering they went to prevent, the suffering they may have caused in the attempt, the suffering they may have felt about that – the suffering that they shared amongst themselves and with the Iraqi people.
As serving military, the authors took a big risk in publishing their piece. Editor and Publisher quotes the military saying they will not be disciplined.
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Someone stop me before I blog myself into homelessness.
1This is not really the NIE. It is the declassified summary. Does this matter? My tautological answer? More than the Bush Administration would care to admit. [The rumor passed along by Rachel Maddow is that the classified version says al-Maliki has got to go.] Also, it isn’t really a new NIE it is an update to the January 2007. Does this matter? I doubt it.
2 No wonder nobody besides Noam actually reads these things.
3For this comparison, I include myself.
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This Sunday, the American Psychological Association will vote on a moratorium on its members participating in the interrogation of military detainees. Their annual convention in San Francisco started this morning. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez dedicated this morning’s Democracy Now to the Padilla verdict and the APA moratorium. Reporting from San Francisco, they had on two members of Psychologists for an Ethical APA. Dr. Steven Reisner, faculty member at NYU Medical School and Dr. Stephen Soldz, Professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and author of the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. The APA leadership declined an invitation to appear.
I’m coming late to this story. Democracy Now has 22 segments about it including an in-depth interview with former APA president and perpetrator of the infamous Stanford Jail Experiment, Philip Zimbardo [including video clips from the original experiment]. Underlying the controversy is the secret transformation of the SERE program, initiated during the Korean War, from preparing flyers to resist if captured and tortured to “enhanced interrogation” techniques – scientifically engineered extraction of information from human captives. The APA response to this depends a lot on “what did they know and when did they know it?” The best single account I’ve seen is by Mark Benjamin appeared appeared on Salon and was mirrored by Stephen Soldz on Psyche, Science, and Society. The APA has attempted, over time, to address the issue, but the “dissidents” think a moratorium is the only real answer. According to them, the superego really hit the fan when:
A recently declassified August 2006 Department of Defense report confirms that psychologists were directly responsible for the development and use of techniques defined by the International Red Cross as “tantamount to torture.” These techniques continue to be employed against enemy combatants in Guantanamo and other military and CIA run facilities.
The APA conference has a program series, Ethics and Interrogations: Confronting the Challenge. The presenters page for this track, lists only two names with a connection to Harvard.
Robert Kinscherff, PhD., Esq.,whose gazillion government, professional association, and academic positions, includes an appointment to the Harvard Medical Faculty.
Herbert C. Kelman, Ph.D., is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus.
I don’t yet know the Harvard connection to the “dark side, if you will.” Stay tuned.
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Zone of Protection around outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, Surrey England August 2007. Graphic: timesonline.com.
In response to an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease in Surrey, England health authorities have established the zone of protection shown above. Near the center of it, is a research establishment [as the Brits say] called Pirbright that houses samples of the offending virus. The establishment was carefully designed. Outbreaks simply cannot occur. But it appears it did.
This is yet another of a continuing history of biolab outbreaks documented by local activists opposing the siting of such a facility in Boston’s largely minority neighborhood of Roxbury. BU is claiming that it is a done deal. Local activists say no!
Dorchester People for Peace Hosts:
Tonight! Monday, August 13, BU’s Bubonic Biolab: Update On A Community Hazard 6:30pm (refreshments), 7-9pm, program. Vietnamese American Community Center, 42 Charles St., next to Fields Corner T Station1
Boston University is building a Level 4 “Biodefense” Laboratory across the street from Boston Medical Center. When finished, the laboratory will experiment with the most deadly organisms in the world, for which there is no known cure. Laboratory researchers may combine and engineer the organisms to make them even deadlier and more contagious. Roxbury residents who live near the lab have been fighting to stop it for more than two years. Come hear them describe the progress they are making and the crucial court hearing that’s coming up in September.
Speakers:
Klare Allen, coordinator, Safety Net
Laura Maslow Armand, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
and community residents, state and federal attorneys, and local scientists.
Don’t miss this timely update!
Wheelchair accessible. Free, refreshments served. For more info or if you need childcare, a ride, please call 617-282-3783.
1The Red Line splits at Andrew. Take a train destined for Ashmont.
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New documentary on the Iraq War Opens in Select Cities Including Cambridge Today!
The official website has trailers and a full listing of cities.
In Cambridge, there are several showings daily at the Kendall Square Cinema .
New in this film, Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Sidney Blumenthal says that this has the White House worried that Colin Powell might become an open critic of U.S. Iraq policy.
See Linda Count the cost of the war.
Economist Linda Bilmes ’80 from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government documents the toll. I first heard of her when the national press noted her publication, together with Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University, “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of the Conflict.” Their estimate – $2 trillion – differed by a factor of four from official estimates. Their analysis included the cost of treating wounded veterans. Official estimates did not.
author James Bamford also appears. His previous works, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, reveal the inner workings of the National Security Agency. He obtained much of the information by filing for declassification under the Freedom of Information Act. Bamford was raised in Natick, Massachusetts and got his law degree from Suffolk County Law.
