chronicles the NSA’s role in eavesdropping both befor

chronicles the NSA’s role in eavesdropping both before and after 9/11. Drawing on dozens of interviews

with agency insiders and probing publicly available sources as well as transcripts of terrorist trials

and an FBI chronology of the terrorists’ movements, NOVA assembles a detailed picture of events

leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

The program sheds light on the vital data known inside the NSA but only partly relayed to other

agencies. The trove of information the NSA had access to in advance included Osama bin Laden’s now-

disconnected direct satellite phone, which the NSA tapped starting in 1996. Exclusive footage shows the

three-story house in Yemen that served as Al Qaeda’s communications and logistics headquarters. The

NSA was listening in on phone communications to and from the house for years prior to the 9/11 attack.

Three times the size of the CIA and far more secret, the NSA is comprised of top linguists,

mathematicians, and technologists trained to decipher all kinds of communications—epitomizing the

hidden world of high-tech, 21st-century surveillance. To show how this eavesdropping operates, NOVA

follows the trail of just one typical e-mail sent from Asia to the UGGs Sheepskin Cuff Boots Streaming

as pulses of light into a fiber-optic cable, it travels across the Pacific Ocean, coming ashore in

California, and finally reaching an AT&T facility in San Francisco, where the cable is split and the

data sent to a secret NSA monitoring room on the floor below. This enables the NSA to intercept not

only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire UGGs Sheepskin Cuff Boots internal Internet

traffic.