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NSA, The Technology Future, and Where It Is
cowmix writes "It was weird watching 60
Minutes II last week when the head of the NSA was complaining that
his organization was totally behind in technology. Further, he told of stories
of the organization's horrible inefficiencies and even went into how at
the first of January 2000 all the computers in the NSA were down for three
days. The thing that really shocked me was seeing pictures of the inside
of one of the NSA headquarters and also SEEING people decoding telephone
conversations.
I didn't know what to make of it."
I am beginning to wonder about the role that the NSA is playing. If they are becoming so open, allowing cameras in, openly admitting to being subjected to serious y2k downtime? Telling their families/neighbors they are part of the organization?
Perhaps this is a diversion from a newer, better agency working behind closed doors. Please let me hope so. If the NSA really had the problems they said I am quite afraid of the problems we may encounter w/China and International terrorists (especially now that we are thinking of arming Taiwan w/missles)
NSA: Ce pathogène est sérieux.
has some cool stuff about crypto invloving the NSA.
There was an article in the Post last month that had an interview with the current head of the NSA that basically said the same things. While the NSA my have some of the same problems that other government agencies have, some of their claims are not exactly true. I have 2 friends with some knowledge on the subject. The first was with the NSA during the early 70's at an NSA base in a country that "America wasn't at." The second is online currently at Ft. Meade. Both will tell you that the technology used is truly amazing and that money is not much of an issue. All workstations get replaced roughly yearly. In closing, I don't think the NSA is the big bad agency that most people make them out to be. After all, there is a shred of patriotism left in America and I'd like to think that that the fine individuals employed with the National Security Agency are a corner post of this patriotism.
Keep Austin Weird!
Bullshit warning: I'm about to pull a lot of numbers out my ass. I hope to be semi-reasonable and conservative, but it's guesswork nonetheless.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument the NSA can in fact intercept any transmission and beyond that can convert any spoken words in any language to flawless text.
5 minutes of phone time per person per day worldwide
6 billion people
at least 1 word every 3 seconds
2 people in the typical conversation
8 character average word length (w/ space)
= 2.4 Terabytes per day
200 important daily newspapers
50,000 words per issue
= 80 Mbytes per day
5,000 magazines / periodicals
median time of 2 weeks
100 pages on average
average 400 words per page
= 114 Mbytes per day
15,000 worldwide radio stations
35% of time is spoken
1 word every 2 seconds in spoken segments
= 1.8 Gigabytes
7 million new webpages a day (source)
10k average size
= 70 Gigabytes per day
500 million email users
average 0.5 email sent per user per day
18k average email size (source)
= 4.5 Terabytes per day
Total = 7 Terabytes per day
If the NSA really were out to track everything, suffice it to say, it's one monster of a computer engineering problem. We are generating more information than ever and don't have the same kinds of well defined enemies. And how many actual analysts are required to make any sense of all that? Is it any wonder they might be falling behind?
Of course I'm sure there are lots of sources of information, such as TV, that I haven't even covered.
It is, furthermore, the real reason why I get disgusted by NSA's anti-crypto stance: It's about protecting their jobs exactly as they are today. There's this expectation of entitlement, that because they've always been able to decrypt some significant percentage of messages, they should always be able to do so. Adapting to changes in technology? Hey, that's for the rest of the world, not us. Focus on weak links, traffic analysis, other techniques forced upon us in the past? C'mon, there's only 8 hours in a day -- we'll just outlaw anything that would make our work more difficult.
It's resulted in absurdities like encryption jobs (and know-how!) moving to other countries, CSS's unusually easy-to-break "encryption," and t-shirts classified as munitions. Way to go, guys.
I will certainly agree that it might cost more, but I, too, would like some assurance that Congress isn't paying them to remain clueless bureaucrats. I don't insist that they open up every line item throughout their budget -- just some acknowledgment of their new, post-Cold War situation. I would love for DIRNSA to get in front of Congress and say "Okay, we can't count on being able to break the encryption on any message out there, so we're changing the focus of our efforts to X, Y, and Z. We'll continue encryption research, try to figure out the best way to crack existing schemes, but our efforts have to take into account the rising tide of encryption technology use. But for that to be successful, we'll need more money because..."
Would that be so hard?
TSG
There was a piece on Off The Hook talking about that book, saying that after it was published, Reagan actually classified parts of it, resulting in an "abridged" second edition!
Attila the Hun actually almost never outnumbered his opponents. He won using carefully-crafted deception plans and sheer terror to demoralize his enemies.
The Allies were able to intercept and decrypt a huge chunk of Nazi messages throughout WWII as a result of their ongoing effort to crack Enigma. These decrypts probably shortened the war in Europe by months if not years, but they had to use the intercepts wisely, so as not to tip off the Germans.
During the 1950s, the Russians talked about atomic bombs 'rolling off the assembly lines like sausages', when they actually had a very limited stockpile.
The point is that sometimes you deceive your enemy into thinking that you're stronger than you are, and at other times you make them think you're weaker than you actually are.
Intelligence agencies are any nation's first and last line of defense. They're the ones that tip off leaders about potential dangers, well before they surface on CNN or in the pages of the Washington Times. They're also the ones who can provide the necessary misdirection so that critical programs are not detected by the intelligence resources of other nations.
Case in point: The F-117 Stealth Fighter. Remember when Testor's came out with a plastic model of what they thought the Stealth looked like? The Pentagon freaked out on Testor's and tried to keep them from selling the model kit. Of course, when it was revealed a few years later that an F-117 group had actually been flying *operationally* for several years, and that the Stealth fighter looked nothing like the model, we could all see the depth of the deception effort.
If the NSA releases its doors to the television cameras, *particularly* to 60 Minutes (which has a long history of not having a clue about defense-related matters), it's part of an extensive deception plan.
They're just doing their job.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Another comment: Democracy depends on citizens being able to discover if the elected officials are doing a good job. When agencies of the government are allowed to be secretive, we have no way of holding them accountable. We have no way of knowing whether we should vote for an elected official, because we have no way of knowing what he or she did when working in secrecy.
I don't know if the NSA is doing a good job. You don't know that, either. And, neither of us have any way of collecting accurate information, so that we could form an opinion.
U.S. government agencies have, in the past, admitted to arranging the killing of foreign leaders. If that is their history, certainly morality won't stop them from committing any crime, or publishing any lie.
Bush's education improvements were
I worked at the NSA for three years, and left recently enough to have been there for some of the events discussed in the "60 Minutes" story. Disclaimer: When I left the agency, I was disgusted at a personal (they screwed me over), ethical (I have this funny thing about hypocrisy) and professional (mathematics & computer science) level, so take this for what it's worth.
I also signed an agreement when I left saying I would submit anything I wrote about NSA for publication to their public relations office for approval before submitting it, but I seem to have lost their address. Oh well.
One thing I've noticed in a lot of the other responses is a reaction to the apparent contradiction between "they can read everything, everywhere" and "our systems are broken, we need more money or we'll fall apart." In a sense, both things are true, and it illustrates what I think is one of NSA's biggest problems.
Yes, of course, NSA has some amazing technology. But these gee-whiz supercomputers and super-secret devices are like little islands in a sea of technological muck. When you hear about secretaries doing word processing on Crays at NSA, it is not because they have so much excess capacity just lying around, it is because the secretary's desktop unit probably really sucks and she has no other choice. Did the entire network shut down for nearly a week? Yes, I recall going to work one morning and seeing a sign posted on the turnstiles, "Don't log in when you get to your office." While all those brilliant minds were busy with gee-whiz projects (that is, after all, how you get the cash awards and the promotions), the infrastructure was being allowed to rot. After all, what looks better at evaluation time: "I played a small, seemingly insignificant part in making sure that NSA's wide-area network stayed up" or "I created a new system using insert hot technology here that resulted in a insert big percentage here increase in processed traffic against insert country name here, a high priority target"?
That's the big problem I was talking about. NSA does have some really smart people, but their management stinks. I mean, really stinks. It's been referred to as the "Glen Burnie full employment project" (a Baltimore suburb near Ft. Meade). After all, there might be some incentive to go through all the security nonsense (an essentially random process which can't be proven to prevent anything) to get a job there, if you're a techie and you think you might get to play with some neat toys, or if you're a mathematician in a bad academic job market. But if you're a manager, the only way you'll be interested in NSA is if you are really not that talented, but heck, you have an uncle who can probably get you into a pretty good position and you won't have to worry about getting laid off, like you would at the phone company.
So when you hear that the agency's response to some new technology is a hamhanded effort to make it illegal, or at least unexportable, and you ask yourself, "What could they be thinking? They can't be that stupid!" think again.
Another big problem with the NSA, CIA, etc. is an inherent contradiction at the heart of what they do. In the middle of a (supposedly) free society, that is made up of a mixture of cultures from all over the world, you have a bunch of people who do all of their work in secret and steal information from other countries. Okay, maybe they call it "maintaining information on a need-to-know basis" and "intelligence gathering" but we know what the point is here, right? When we're not at war with a country, it's pretty hard to justify doing things to them as an organization that, on a personal level, would be wrong and just creepy. Especially when you might have good neighbors who were born in that country. Or even relatives. Back in the 1960's, when the average engineer was kind of a WASPy dweeb, the contradiction wasn't so apparent. But take a look at the population of any engineering class now. It's way more diverse, and you're simply going to have a harder time justifying the "we're in a constant state of war" line with these people. It just doesn't make sense anymore. And yes, the terrorism that NSA talking heads mention when they're begging for money has something to do with the crap we've dealt people around the world for years. After all, what are Bin Laden and his followers upset about? The US presence in Muslim holy lands. Why are we there? Leftovers from the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. How did he get so powerful? The US backed him against Iran. Why was Iran a big problem? The people who overthrew the Shah hated the US. Why? Because the Shah was a tyrant backed by--who? That's right, the CIA.
This is already too long, but one final thing about NSA listening to your phone conversations. If you're not a US citizen and you're not currently in the US, you're fair game to these people, but you're also probably not very interesting (see the comment about getting cash awards and promotions above). If you are interesting to them for some (possibly nonsensical) reason, that is if listening to you can get some analyst a promotion, there you go. If you are a US citizen, or you are currently residing in the US, then the NSA cannot legally spy on you, and nobody gets promoted if the lawyers aren't happy. But if the FBI develops a (perhaps nonsensical) interest in you, it is not hard to get a warrant for whatever kind of surveillance they want to do, and guess where they get their technology?
"It's called the two-party system, and our laws are specifically designed to encourage it and raise the bar for anyone outside the two established parties. Overall, it's a slight improvement over the Soviet-style one-party system. But not much..."
Great points... Especially given that the two parties are SO similar in stance, that the differences can be broken down to this: Republicans want the government to grow by 7% and the Democrats by 10%... Any growth in the size of government is an infringement of freedom, so obviously neither party is your friend if you are for civil liberties, as evidenced by the unanimous quasi-secret whitewash that both conspired to pass the DMCA.
Which is why we need a third party. The Libertarians are closest to my actual philosophy, though I don't really favor taking the hands off the corps as they would (though the Libertarians DO oppose laws like the DMCA, which empowers corps at the expense of the Constitution).
The two major parties are so entrenched though, that there is little chance that any third party can seriously threaten the monopoly, especially when you consider that barely HALF the registered (which itself is barely more than HALF the ELIGIBLE voters) will get off their asses and vote.
And of those who do vote (which is roughly 25-33% of the population), the Demopublican machine keeps third parties off the ballots by throwing down HARD requirements that make third parties spend a LOT of their $$$ raised just to get on the ballot, so they may not even SEE another party... Also, there is a convienient "straight ticket" button in many states, further cheapening the process.
It's a bad process, but it's one that exists because the American masses accept it. Unfortunately, things are ultimately up to THEM, not us, so if we are ever going to change things, we need to get busy educating Joe-6-pack.
Generally speaking, it's Joe-6-pack who gets his way, when the masses get upset about something, no matter HOW bad an idea it is (such as medicare perscription drug coverage, something that will throw an already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy system over the edge), they will JUMP all over it...
Why do you think there have been some in Congress who have proposed compulsary licensing, that would force the RIAA to license Napster? It's because a lot of Joe-6-Packs out there are upset that Napster is gone and they can't steal music anymore.
It won't happen, of course, because of the strength of the corporate lobby, but a number of politicos DID jump out there to make themselves look like they "care about this" to placate the restless masses.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance