[7] While in law school as a Navy reservist, Bamford blew the whistle on the NSA when he learned about a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens.

Washingtonian magazine called it "a monument to investigative journalism" and The New York Times Book Review said, "Mr. Bamford has uncovered everything except the combination to the director's safe.

"[9] During the course of writing the book, Bamford discovered that the Justice Department in 1976 began a secret criminal investigation into widespread illegal domestic eavesdropping by the NSA.

As a result, he filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)[10][11] for documents dealing with the investigation and several hundred pages were eventually released to him by the Carter administration.

However, when President Ronald Reagan took office, the Justice Department sought to stop publication of the book and demanded return of the documents, claiming they had been "reclassified" as top secret.

However, due to ex post facto restrictions in the US Constitution, the new executive order could not be applied to Bamford and the information was subsequently published in The Puzzle Palace.

But after the book was published, agency officials met with Carter at a secure location in Colorado, where he was in retirement, and threatened him with prosecution if he did not immediately close his collection and refrain from further interviews.

"[18] The Washington Post listed the book as one of "The Best of 2004" and in a cover review said, "Bamford does a superb job of laying out and tying together threads of the Sept. 11 intelligence failures and their ongoing aftermath.

On August 17, 2006, District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor granted summary judgment for Bamford and the other plaintiffs, ruling that the surveillance was unconstitutional and illegal, and ordered that it be halted immediately.

As a result, the government was forced to throw out the charges against Drake in exchange for a misdemeanor plea for abusing his computer, with no jail time or even a fine.

Additionally, Bamford has testified as an expert witness on intelligence issues before committees of the Senate and House of Representatives as well as the European Parliament in Brussels and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

During the 2010s, Bamford wrote a number of cover stories for Wired magazine as a contributing editor, including "The Most Wanted Man in the World,"[8][29] the result of three days in Moscow with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the longest any journalist has spent with him there.

All the more concerning is that Bamford utilizes his gift for exaggeration as a classic Yellow Journalist to spin the deeply problematic narrative of Israeli (and explicitly Jewish) puppet-masters pulling the strings of world affairs from the behind the scenes".

The latter review points to a negative assessment of the book written by the Central Intelligence Agency and praises it for its critical view of Israel's intervention in United States politics.