A Night with James Bamford: NSA Expert

James Bamford, the country’s top independent expert and author on the National Security Agency (NSA), will address the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on February 4th. He will talk about the information-gathering capabilities of the super-secret NSA and the scandal surrounding the Edward Snowden whistleblower affair and how that has affected the Agency. Snowden’s leaking of classified NSA documents has provoked an ongoing debate about the competing claims of individual privacy and the needs of intelligence gathering.

Bamford wrote the first major book on the NSA in 1982, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency – despite being threatened on several occasions with legal action under the Espionage Act. Since then he has written two more books on the NSA – Body of Secrets in 2002 and The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America in 2008.

Mr. Bamford has written investigative stories for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Wired Magazine and The Atlantic, and is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, as a distinguished visiting professor. In 2014, Bamford conducted the lengthiest in person interview to date with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow. Bamford was an intelligence analyst for the US Navy for three years during the Vietnam war, and then got a law degree from Suffolk University Law School in Boston before becoming a writer.

The event will be held at the Sofitel Hotel on Beverly Boulevard
at 7:30PM on Wednesday, February 4th.

For more information on the event and to purchase a seat, please
visit the official Los Angeles World Affairs Council event page here: http://www.lawac.org/Default.aspx?tabid=103&eventid=30266

You can also reserve by calling (424) 258-6160. Please make your reservation by
Monday, February 2nd.