"Chatter," the book

"Inside the secret world of evesdropping." It's by Patrick Radden Keefe. And I'd call it an interesting, moderately useful read (or, in my case, listen - the audio version is well read).

"Chatter" doesn't shed any groundbreaking new light on the world of signals intelligence (SIGINT), nothing that would constitute a brilliant revelation in the current matter involving NSA intercepts by the Bush administration. But what it does do - and helpfully - is a good job at bringing together a myriad of already-known (by the cognizant) facts about communications intelligence and arranging them in a contextual whole. Keefe's viewpoint is what I'd call middle-of-the-road - he takes his subject seriously without becoming overly entranced by the paranoia on its fringes. And although his opinion differs from my own on some few points and he makes, to my personal knowledge, some few errors in reportage, Keefe's take on the subject is to be greatly preferred to the pop-news (or pop-net) rants now extant.

So if you're interested in the history and the practice of electronic intelligence gathering or if you're concerned about its application in our current world, I'd recommend this book.

Here's a link to it at Barnes & Noble if you're interested in finding out more about it.

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