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."

Comments

Ok, this article is confusing me.

[garcia]

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)

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[BitwizeGHC]

In the book "This Perfect Day" by Ira Levin (author of Rosemary's Baby), all of society worldwide is controlled by the massive benevolent UniComp computer. Tourists are taken in droves to see UniComp in its daily operations.

Only it's not really UniComp. The real Uni is hidden in an underground complex, and its sole purpose is to keep a certain political leader in power...

This novel hasn't been in print for years and reading it is a rare opportunity. I think it forebodes today's society in many interesting ways...

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[doubleyou]

Suddenly? There's nothing "suddenly" about it. It's called self-preservation. And it has nothing to do with them being Chinese. If you were to ask me who's life is more important, mine or yours, I would say mine, hands-down. And if someone were to threaten my life, assuming it comes to that, you can be sure I'd kill him before he could kill me. If I'm given a choice to live or die, then a level playing field is the last thing I want - I want the advantage.

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[cybrpnk]

If the Americans hadn't broken the Japanese
"Purple" code in the 1930s, we in all probability would have lost the Battle of Midway in the 1940s and now in the 21st Century it would have been entirely possible that China would be a Japanese puppet. Likewise, if the Poles (and later the British) hadn't started breaking German Enigma code starting in the 1930s, we would probably lost the Battle of the Atlantic in the 1940s and there might still be a Nazi presence in Europe in the 21st Century. A little intellectual homework now can alter the course of millions of lives a decade or two down the road. America has flaws and is far from perfect, but We Are The Good Guys and hell no, we should NEVER settle for a level playing field in matters of national security. War is NEVER about honor - it is about WINNING. Preferably fast and with minimum loss of life if possible...

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[Howie]

"...but We Are The Good Guys..."

bollocks. From the (perhaps just a little biased) view of a resident, perhaps, but not capital G good.

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[DJerman]

Perhaps this is a diversion from a newer, better agency working behind closed doors.

Naturally -- they're just a blind for CURE.

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[cybrpnk]

Pal, you need to do some reading. The Chinese military took over Tibet, pretty routinely has attacked India and North Vietnam every few years over border disputes, and last but not least killed thousands of Americans in the Korean War. All of this is nothing compared to what the Chinese military did to its own people during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s - literally millions died in what was effectively a civil war where the Maoists consolidated their power. And remember who drove the tanks over the students in Tienneman Square?

As for the US, we do not specifically target civilians in any of the countries you mentioned although I agree civilians do unfortunately die in American attacks. Nevertheless, the US attacks have stopped the governments of those countries from wholescale slaughter of Kurds and Muslims. I am sorry that scattered civilians are killed by US bombs but that is peanuts compared to the mass graves of hundreds of minority civilians killed by the armies of those countries.

Yes, I do believe the US are the Good Guys. We conquered Japan and Germany and gave it back. We conquered a dozen little countries over the past fifty years - Honduras, Congo, Lebanon, Grenada -others - and gave them all back. We kept a Cold War from going hot and gave our beated opponents tens of billions in IMF aid that was squandered by corruption. We conquered a trillion dollar reservoir of oil and had a half million troops in a land totally unable to resist militarily, and we gave it all back. No other country in the world or all of history has conquered so much and walked away from the spoils the way America did in the 20th century. Only the Good Guys do that.

Now, is the US perfect? Worthy of unquestioned loyalty? Guarenteed to always be the Good Guys in the future just because they have been in the past? Hell, no. We have bad people that can make bad decisions at the drop of a hat. The citizens of the US must ALWAYS stay on their toes and strive to act responsibly. We will often fail. Nevertheless, if we become so cynical that we no longer recognize or acknowledge just how amazing America has been on the world stage, we do something worse than making mistakes of judgement - we will kill hope that ANYBODY is going to try to make the world better from the madness raging in the Congo and Zaire and Cambodia and Kosovo and Bosnia and Iraq and a dozen other flashpoints. That would be a tragedy of epic proportions. Resist it.

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[Stephen Samuel]

Not really all that open. The cameras were allowed in to specific places at specific times. I'd bet that the people listening to Bin Laden's current cell phone conversatons just happened to be working on a different floor, that day. Remember that these people are issued office keys by machine every morning. They probably take it completely in stride to find that they're working in a different office -- or even in a different building -- this morinig.

Also: The cameras allowed in were video cameras. Compared to film, video has a very low resolution. You're not going to be able to blow up an image and discern much text on a screen that a video camera isn't obviously focused on.

One of the things about intelligence is designing when to let your adversaries know what information. Their computer outage was more than a year ago. There's not much that an enemy could do with that data now. Chances are that important data from that time was collected, stored, and has been decoded/dealt with by now.

Then there's the fact that the Europeans are releasing reports on joint signal collecting (I can't remember the name of the agreement, just now) this week. I timely moment to mention that the domestic spook agency feels powerless.

It's not a shock to me that the NSA is releasing information. My questions are:

• why
• How much of it is accurate and
• what did they hide from us?

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[cybrpnk]

I agree. It is plain old hypocritical to ding the Iraqis and ignore the Turks. The list of bullies and thugs the US has supported and continues to support because they are on "our side" is disgusting. I am at a loss over how to stop this as just one guy at a keyboard with a thousand other things on my mind. All I know is that as a first step, it has to be brought out into the open for all to see. That's what you've done. Bravo.

Re:Ok, this article is confusing me.

[cybrpnk]

Good point - mod this up!

Are we supposed to believe this?

[none2222]

I have a hard time trusting the director of the NSA's public assessment of that organizations capabilities. Keep in mind, the very existence of the NSA was classified for decades.

Now, we're supposed to believe that the NSA when they go on national TV and complain about their lack of money? Bullshit! Perhaps if their budget was not classified to begin with, this would warrant looking into. As it stands, I'll take any info from the NSA as the FUD it is.

Re:Are we supposed to believe this?

[The_Steel_General]

Believe it. What he said (bureaucracy, office politics, inefficiency) was exactly my impression when I worked there not so long ago.

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

Re:Are we supposed to believe this?

[Surak]

"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..."

There wouldn't be much public support for it. Society has labelled the NSA as a relic of the Cold War and now they're considered the "enemy" of the American public...

I doubt that they would get much money at all, to be honest with you.

An easy solution

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh*

If only they'd been using *nix Beowulf clusters, eh?

Body of Secrets

[ksw2]

It's not the first time we've heard of the Y2k incident... read Body of Secrets by James Bamford. It's an excellent book detailing the entire history of the NSA.

Re:Body of Secrets

[ksw2]

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!

What the heck is an "encoded" conversation.

[Red Moose]

What, lots of nudges and winks during it? Lots of metaphors? Double-entendres?

How about someone tells me where I can get something to ENCODE my telephone conversations. I tried it today manually and it's a real bitch to keep saying "Dot-dot-dash-dash-dash". I got sick of that, and then tried ROT-13 in conversation but that was even worse, so I just went back to speaking English.

Surely the terrorists are foreign and so speak foreign languages? Maybe stop employing geeks and get some linguists? It's like, why don't airplane hijackers just get the on the right goddamn plane in the first place like the rest of the people who can READ THE GODDAMN FLIGHT INFORMATION SCREENS.

Re:What the heck is an "encoded" conversation.

[BradleyUffner]

Very true, but as much as I don't want to trust the NSA, I don't want to trust 60 minuites a\even more. IMHO, 60 minuites is just another one of those "Sensationalize the story so that it appeals to the common denominator" type shows. I would trust the NSA more so then I would trust 60 minuites. But that's just me.

The violins are playing...

[TastyWheat]

The NSA is full of more shit than the christmass turkey. I suppose all their voice recognition systems on echelon are condidered low level technology. NSA can eat shit and die until they stop listening to my phone calls. They just want more money so they can upgrade echelon to peer right through the roof of your house. They won't be satisfied until they can read our minds.

Re:The violins are playing...

[BradleyUffner]

"The NSA is full of more shit than the christmass turkey."

So Is 60 Minuites.

Propaganda

[Sneakums]

Clearly this is a whitewash, designed to lull the public into complacency. The NSA is a highly-honed machine, and the American public are the victims of a massive hoax.

Spread the word!

Re:Propaganda

[rbeattie]

It's a plot! The NSA goes on 60 minutes to complain about their technology KNOWING that someone would post a link on /. and now they are watching posts for signs of "dangerous hackers."

Don't think for a minute the NSA isn't watching you NOW.

Then again maybe the NSA is a typical government agency that promotes mismanagement and ineptitude. Think about your local DMV only with encryption.

Or maybe I'm a NSA mole trying to put you off the scent of the real scheme... (Never ending, isn't it...)

Re:The First of Jan 2000?

[codegen]

Old News. It was reported in Jan 2000.
I was involved in Y2K remediation at the time and I remember it being reported in mainstream news media, although it was ususally (but not always) reported as "DoD Satellite Intelligence".

Exactly what is their agenda...

[bihoy]

It would seem to me that the NSA may benifit from being perceived as behind in technology on several fronts. First it may cause those they monitor to let their guard down, though I cna't imagine anyone with any smarts really falling for that old trick.

Second, and more importantly, it gives them an edge in seeking additional funding. Now I don't know how their funding is approved (does anyone) but I wouldn't be surprised if it has become an issue.

Can we really trust that there is any validity to these statements and what was shown. How would you verify this information.

Be careful about anything said about the NSA.

[Futurepower(tm)]

Be careful about anything said about the NSA. The NSA is one of the departments of hidden activity of the U.S. government.

The NSA has an essentially unlimited amount of money. Citizens of the U.S. are not allowed to know the amount.

Would the NSA spend millions of dollars to engineer an elaborate lie? Yes, it might. We have no way of knowing whether it did.

Hidden activities are anti-democratic. If citizens aren't allowed to know what the government does, how can citizens help govern? Are your tax dollars being spent wisely? You are not allowed to know.

Re:Be careful about anything said about the NSA.

[Omerna]

If citizens aren't allowed to know what the government does, how can citizens help govern?

This is what being in a representative democracy is all about. You don't necessarily know what the gov't is doing. You have to trust your elected officials. If you don't like what they're doing (did) you just don't vote for them next time. It seems like a haphazard way to run things, but it has worked this far.

Remember that the NSA, CIA, and what have you do need to justify themselves to commitees of the officials you elect. So you are indirectly controlling how your tax dollars are spent.

Re:Be careful about anything said about the NSA.

[grue23]

The NSA has an essentially unlimited amount of money. Citizens of the U.S. are not allowed to know the amount.

This is simply no longer the case. It was true of the NSA and other intel agencies during the cold war, especially during the Reagan years. However, with Congressional interest in a balanced budget, these agencies have been scrutinized fairly intensely and now have to operate their programs within budgets.

That is actually one reason that they are 'behind' in some ways. They used to have all the money they wanted to build anything they needed from the ground up. Now they are shifting from that model to needing to use prebuilt components ('COTS' - Consumer Off The Shelf). There is not as much expertise with using these types of components, and in many cases they engineer systems in sort of strange ways because the COTS products are treated as if they were developed internally in regard to testing and design.

Washington Post article

[gr8fulnded]

Here's a three page article which appeared in the Washington Post Magazine about a month ago. More in-depth then the 60 mins one and goes into the some details about the problems facing The Agency in the coming years... Washington Post NSA article

Disinformation

[YIAAL]

They just want you to think that they're horribly behind the times. They're actually already using quantum decryption, and laughing at your puny 256-bit PGP keys.

It was reported in January 2000

[peter303]

Ironically the super spy agency was one of the
few organizations to report a serious Y2K problem.

NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

My aunt works with crypto for The Company. She's amazingly good at avoiding conversation on the topic, but from what I've been able to pick up, the concept of the NSA being a more open, friendly, and underfunded is completely bunk. It's an interesting PR move, though. They must have a reason for saying and doing such things, and I suspect is has to do with gaining the public's trust.

curse of covert agencies

[e_lehman]

Most government agencies stink. There's no competition, no possibility of going bankrupt. I think that makes quality control very difficult.

I believe this problem is much MORE pronounced in the national security bureaucracy. People can't be fired without contemplating the security risks. Ineffective people can be concealed, because so much is concealed. Old boys networks can flourish unchecked. The degree of public accountability is essentially nil.

I know NSA has a lot of bright people, but they must also have more deadwood than the coast of Maine.

Well...

[Sarcasmooo!]

I dunno what is going on at the NSA, but I know that the people from the NSA aren't gonna tell you the truth about it. The notion that this could be even remotely truthful is rediculous; an agency charged with intelligence gathering on all foreign soil admits publicly that it's out of shape, underfunded, and vulnerable? Yeah, sure, I believe that. I'd sooner bet my life savings on the theory that somewhere sits a document detailing counterintelligence plans to spread propaganda like this for the simple purposes of winning a bigger budget or deceiving foreign targets.

It wouldn't suprise me...

[th3walrus]

The NSA probably is behind... way behind. I've worked on several government projects (none classified or anything though) and they've all been way behind the times. Why do you think there was such a big call for legacy programmers a few years back? And why do you think there isn't anymore? Did they just all of a sudden get everything up to date? No... They quit.

Also, the NSA has been really trying hard to get new young faces in their information security departments. They've even gone so far as offering dot-com competitive salaries and benefits to their programmers and systems people.

Besides, they're not gods. They're just people like you or me, and it's just a 'company' like any other. Why couldn't they be having some financial difficulties? Sure, we pay tons of taxes, but the government is more interested in feeding bums and helping other nations than protecting our country.

I seriously doubt the NSA lacks computing power

[NeMon'ess]

Really? The NSA is woefully behind in technology? I can't prove that any of these supercomputers went to the NSA but looking at this list, the government now owns at least seven of the top five-hundred supercomputers. Most of these are in the top 200 and all were bought in the past four years. Note the computer's uses are classified so who knows if the NSA got them or all went to the FBI and CIA.

What are they up against?

[dragons_flight]

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.

Re:What are they up against?

[Fishstick]

what % of the 6 billion even have phones? Probably not as much as you might even think.

Reminds me of the SantaClaus thing about how he would have to approach the speed of light to visit every child on earth in a 24-hour period: until you factor out that the % of christian children among all those in the world is like ~20%

Re:What are they up against?

[dragons_flight]

Well I certainly didn't come up with 5 minutes a person looking to the industrialized world. Most people in the US use far more than that. For instance my teenage sister probably spends 2 hours a day talking to her best friend. That way she has covered her alotment and 23 other people without phones.

Seriously, if only 20% of the world has regular phone service (and I'd guess it's a least a little higher than that), then they only have to average 25 minutes a day amongst themselves to still result in 5 minutes a day average worldwide.

It's meant as an average. I never thought to claim that everyone talks for 5 minutes a day.

Re:What are they up against?

[rve]

They probably meant they potentially have access to everything. That doesn't mean they actually intercept and process everything... As any student can tell you: a large part of information gathering is a) knowing where to look, and b) separating the useful data from the fluff.

They probably only tap the usual suspects: arabs, commies, foreigners, blacks, homosexuals, environmentalists, pacifists. Probably in that order.

I can't imagine they bother to screen slashdot posts :)

Shaa right

[z4ce]

Do they given read their own web page? This is a organization who employees many of the top mathematicians in the world. From their own about web page:

NSA employs the country's premier codemakers and codebreakers. It is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States and perhaps the world.

Oh, yes and it gets way better.. from the FAQ..

How many people work for the NSA/CSS and what is its budget?

Neither the number of employees nor the size of the Agency's budget can be publicly disclosed. However, if the NSA/CSS were considered a corporation in terms of dollars spent, floor space occupied, and personnel employed, it would rank in the top 10 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. It is far from true that NSA/CSS has an unlimited "black" budget, unknown by other government entities. While the budget and size of the NSA/CSS are classified, these details are known by the Office of Management and Budget, by both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), and by the Defense Subcommittees of the Appropriations Committees in both houses of Congress. Resources allocated to NSA/CSS are subject to rigorous examination and approval processes.

In 1997, the aggregate figure for all U.S. Government intelligence and intelligence-related activities ? of which NSA/CSS was one segment ? was made public for the first time. The aggregate intelligence budget was $26.6 billion in fiscal year (FY) 1997 and $26.7 billion for FY98. The intelligence budget for FY99 has not been publicly released.

Aw.. poor NSA only gets $26 Billion dollars. It's only the equivalent to a Fortune 50 company. Yeah.. I'm sure its technology is _ancient_.

You know.. we don't actually know jack about our defense capablities I don't think. Of course, if we did then our enemies would also, and they wouldn't be nearly as effective. For example, living in St. Louis, I was talking to someone from Boeing and mentioned how they must not too happy that their missile tests failed. He just laughed and said he couldn't talk about it's classified. Makes you wonder if maybe he was inferring that those public tests don't totally represent the actually success of the projects...

Re:Shaa right

[Crixus]

You know.. we don't actually know jack about our defense capablities I don't think. Of course, if we did then our enemies would also, and they wouldn't be nearly as effective. For example, living in St. Louis, I was talking to someone from Boeing and mentioned how they must not too happy that their missile tests failed. He just laughed and said he couldn't talk about it's classified. Makes you wonder if maybe he was inferring that those public tests don't totally represent the actually success of the projects...

Well, in this case I would disagree.

When Reagan originally proposed SDI he actually spoke about a missile defense sheid that could not be penetrated. He then said we'd share the technology with the Soviets so that there would never be an attack since it would always fail.

In this case I would think we would WANT our enemies to know how good our capabilities at shooting down missiles are. This way they wouldn't attack.

Even if we had a 99% success rate with this system it would still benefit an enemy to launch 100 missiles so that one might get through.

So if anything, I would say we're lying and OVER-estimating our successes, just as we did in the Gulf War when we were told our Patriots were shooting down Scuds left and right, only to learn that we only had something like 2 successful intercepts, and in each of those cases the missile body was blown apart, but the Scud's warhead still fell to earth and exploded.

As always, this new SDI is just congress and the president paying off their corporate masters with HUGE defense contracts to repay them for their campaign contributions. Rich...

Re:Shaa right

[alienmole]

For example, living in St. Louis, I was talking to someone from Boeing and mentioned how they must not too happy that their missile tests failed. He just laughed and said he couldn't talk about it's classified. Makes you wonder if maybe he was inferring that those public tests don't totally represent the actually success of the projects...

Dream on. Unless the guy you were talking to actually worked in the exact defense unit of Boeing, he probably knew as little about the missile tests as you do - maybe less. That's why he laughed. It's like when you meet someone from, say, Germany, and say something like "Hey, I know a guy in Dusseldorf name Hans Pickelgruber, do you know him?" The only meaningful reaction is to laugh.

Boeing is a humongous company, and if you work in say the commercial airliner division, you're not even remotely exposed to what's going on in the defense divisions. Nevertheless, when you sign on as an employee you're still warned not to talk about company business with outsiders. So that explains the reaction you got: laughter because the guy probably knew nothing about the missile tests, and thought it was amusing that you thought he worked just down the hall from where they're building rocket engines and guidance systems, when in reality he works in a cubicle with thousands of other people who are all pushing paper just like him; and stonewalling because the guy's job could be at stake even if he speculates about company business that he knows nothing about with an outsider.

Re:Level playing field is for losers

[cybrpnk]

Well, to be honest, Patton was a brilliant general who never had a chance to cope with life in peacetime - he died in a Jeep accident shortly after the end of the war he helped to win. The great thing about America is that we had generals who shone in peacetime, too - noteably George Marshall with the Marshall plan that rebuilt Europe...

NRO - The National Reconnaisance Office

[Ars-Fartsica]

Perhaps this is a diversion from a newer, better agency working behind closed doors.

You are correct. The NRO has a huge budget and are almost unknown to the American public.

Re:NRO - The National Reconnaisance Office

[clueless_penguin]

The NRO is the same age as NSA, and has a completely different mission. NRO is responsible for launching and operating surveillance platforms. They pass the data on to various agencies (including NSA) to do whatever they do with it. NRO does not use or analyse anything.

There is nothing sinister about the new openess with both NRO and NSA. They have merely been directed to open up a bit so the budgets and operations can be scrutinized a little better. This began about 5 years ago. Regardless, you will still never see the things they regard as truly classified, and there are still a few programs that will not be admitted to.

did i hear... decrypt?

[sydneyfong]

the NSA is violating the DMCA, that's why they ain't got no $$$ ;-)

on the other hand, gimme a SSL port to my phone.

Seems reasonable that they are behind

[gelfling]

How much computing power do you need to brute force solve every 128 bit encrypted data stream in the world, every day in near real time? How much computing power do you need to pattern match and keyword search every data stream in the world every day in near real time? And oh yeah - do it in a hundred languages including all the DBCS.

Er...

[AdamHaun]

> Aw.. poor NSA only gets $26 Billion dollars

Read your citation again. The NSA is *one segment* of the intelligence funding group. From the same page:

There are 13 federal organizations in the Intelligence Community. They
are:

National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS);
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA);
National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA);
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI);
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA);
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO);
Department of Energy (DoE);
Army Intelligence;
Air Force Intelligence;
Navy Intelligence;
Marine Corps Intelligence;
Department of Treasury;

The $26 billion would have been split among the intelligence activities of all 13 of these groups.

If you know of a technically knowledgeable senator

[Futurepower(tm)]

Perhaps your forget that the NSA and CIA are agencies designed to keep their activities hidden. Lying is not only acceptable to them, it is encouraged. Do you think that they disclose everything to the elected officials? I think they don't.

I think the elected officials are very busy, and don't have the time to comprehend what the NSA is doing.

Also, this is my guess: I guess that there is not one elected official who understands the technology the NSA uses. If you know of a technically knowledgeable congressman or senator, please tell me who that is. These are the same people who gave us the DMCA!

Who's the target?

[krazo]

It looks to me like the NSA is fishing for new hires. Let me explain. Every post here seems to be extrememly paranoid about the NSA. "Don't trust them. They're massively powerful. They're trying to trick us." But Slashdot represents a fair slice of the technophile community. If all the geeks fear the NSA, then who is working for them? I think the Good Will Hunting monologue is a fair representation of how most intelligent people feel about the NSA. The NSA needs geniuses to work for them, but the geniuses will have none of it. The NSA is nothing if it doesn't have great minds working for it, so I really have no doubt that it is waning in power. If it loses smart people, it produces fewer results and suddenly it is less necessary, and less funded, etc., etc.

So, it seems to me that they have changed their strategy in an attempt to become more attractive to the people they want to hire. They got burned on their whole attempt to regulate cryptography, and managed to alienate everyone who believes in freedom of inquiry in the process. Maybe they've realized that they can't rely on secrecy anymore, because it doesn't work, and have decided they need to stay ahead technologically. And in order to do this, they need smart people, and in order to get these people, they have to be open and trusted by the public.

In the end, the only thing the NSA is about is National Security. They have a history of being sneaky and untrustworthy and classified, but if they finally realize that it doesn't help national security to be that way, then why wouldn't they change? In government agencies, old habits die hard, but the other thing that dies hard is government agencies. If they get pushed into a corner (which I think they have been by the availability of good public cryptography tools), then I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly did a policy 180. And I think that would be a good thing.

Feel free to disagree =)

NSA not so cloak and dagger

[NitsujTPU]

NSA got a bad rap because it was so secret. In modern times, good cryptography doesn't require so much secretness because it is generally all about yoru computation power and not your ability to steal captain crunch decoder rings from the enemy. It aslo got a bad rap because legislative oversight was sorta bypassed decades ago. The NSA has been looking for a friendlier image to couterract all of the bad publicity that they got. It can't function effectively if people don't trust it, especially in a day and age where NATIONAL SECURITY means that the people of that nation have to practice it too in order to be effective at all. NSA phone taps are all done perfectly legally, we all know that the police station has equipment, and have even seen them use it, why should we be surprised to see the NSA doing it? Remember, these people aren't clandestine agents who require anonymity to function. They're professors, who just need a good office and a compiler.

The NSA is always at war = always deceptive

[Infonaut]

Think of it this way - the NSA has to always operate under the assumption that it is in a state of war. The more information it can gather, the more knowledge about potential threats it can accumulate, the better. The weaker it appears to its potential enemies, the better.

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.

Citizens must be able to know if the officials...

[Futurepower(tm)]

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.

Re:Level playing field is for losers

[cybrpnk]

There is NOTHING honorable or glorious about war. Period. If you find yourself in one, there are two priorities: survive and win. Period. If you get distracted by ANY other goals you are going to suffer needless losses at best and lose at worst. There is no limit to how evil humans can act in times of war. Concepts of honor and glory only delay your descent into these dark levels and let your opponent get there before you do - a tactical advantage that may enable his victory. Be as violent as possible and get it over with as quickly as possible so everybody can get back to peacetime. Cold, hard realities.

Re:Are we supposed to believe this? Some of it

[AndroidCat]

I'd believe the part about some of their tech being behind the times.

Tempest workstations are costly, clunky, and a few years behind the state of the art. The time and effort required for certification is long!

The certification is real fun. You give them the equipment and get back either a pass or fail. No indication as to why it failed. Guess, fix and try, try again. Happy happy joy joy!

Re:The First of Jan 2000?

[boaworm]

It is not really that strange (or at least I dont think so). What is the main reason things went down ?.. The lack of money... There's always lack of money, and I bet even NSA has to cut it's budget sometimes. So, if they leak some information about this to the public, they maybe hope to casue a public demand for more money to the NSA ?

If noone knows what they do, it's quite hard to motivate those huge sums of money sent into the organization. If people on the other hand knows what they are doing (fighting terrorism and other horrible crimes), then perhaps we could live with a few more taxdollars for the NSA. If they catch a bomber before he blows up a bunch of innocent people, thats worth quite a lot to me.

So ... this is a bit like the big brother syndrome, NSA is reading my email. Well I dont really mind. I concider myself a normal citizen, i study computer science (MSc), pay my taxes and enjoy the society. If I send a mail to my friend Mr John Doe, and NSA has some AA (probably a neural net) scanning my mail for "bomb", "saddam" or "stalin", well fine. Dont think they actually have people reading all your private loveletters :-)

What I'm trying to say is, they probably leaked this to make people understand what they are doing, why they are doing it, and that they need more money.
Correct me if i'm wrong.

what people don't realize

[kaisermike]

What people don't realize is that the NSA is more than just what it seems. All COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) technology that is being considered for use in most any part of the gov't/DoD has to be evaluated by these people, and this process is just a very long one at that. At the rate of new stuff coming out, there is a reason why they don't have the funding that they really do need.

Why do normal people laugh at the gov't when they just announce that they are switching to a "new" technology, when in reality it's been out in public for some time. It's the same reason as above...they have to make sure that it fits all the standards to become FIPS compliant for the specified level that they want it at.

Also, quite a bit of technology is in house also, and that requires a really big chunk of money as well.

Of course, another big chunk is the "black" stuff that most people picture the gov't (or just NSA) to be.

seeing it is to accept it .........desensitization

[generationcrm]

seeing it on T.V., openly discussing it, and knowning it exists is the first step for the NSA to be accepted. Desensitize the public, put positive spin on it (we fight crime and terrorist.) then continue to secretly snoop. Mean while the public is not so critical of the NSA and there sneaky objectives. NSA lobbies for more money.....and gets it. It is all about raising awareness of our good friend the NSA.

Don't be too sure

[Hangtime]

Back in high school I read a fiction book by Steven Coonts called the Minotaur. The book was about a high placed mole within the American government feeding information to the Soviets. The whole concept was to feed the Soviets "actual" information about our defense capabilities to get them to move and upgrade certain parts of their defense and essentially give up hope of trying to win.

I thought this was an interesting concept so I started to do a little researching. During the Cold War the Soviets employed a VAST array of missle and radar techonolgy throughout the country in order to combat the bomber threat of a US nuclear strike headed by B-1bs, B-2s, A-10s, and F-117a's and other airborne flight systems including going after AWACS aircraft guiding all these weapon systems.

In the end though the Soviets left the oceans open. This is where America truly deployed its nuclear defense arsenal as opposed to ground and air-based systems. The "boomers" Ohio-class and the nuclear-powered Los Angeles and enhanced LA "hunter-killers" versus an aging fleet of Soviet subs gave the US defacto reign underneath the water. Whereas the U.S. was able to track Soviet Typhoon (boomers) class subs, the Soviets could never track the Ohios with any consistency during the Cold War (if at all) due to its silent operation and sound dampening technologies.

So what do we learn. Sometimes you can divulge information that is factual to mask your true intentions. Using a truth to cover up another truth. The Soviets were scared enough of the B-1B with its ability to go supersonic and a big payload, also they much have known about the B-2 and F-117a's before the public did, why else would you invest that heavily in radar and missle technology. I won't say it all happened this way but it sure falls into place and makes a lot of sense.

Here's something for you to chew on boy genius. Let's say indeed someone launched 100 nuclear warheads at the US and we shot down 99 of them but one got through but through faulty upkeep didn't explode. I bet you would be pretty damn happy then wouldn't you. The world is a very ugly and dirty place. There are MANY people and countries who hate the United States for a number of different reasons. Why did Saddam Hussein not ever launch chemical warheads at Israel during the Gulf War? He knew if he did Israel would fire nukes right back at him.

Personally, I hope we never have to goto war. I don't feel its a good way to solve anything but extremists and irrational people don't responsd to logic and sometimes it takes a good-old-fashioned buttkicking to get it through there heads, ie Saddam Hussein. However there are a special breed of people who don't think about consequences of their actions and are willing to die for their cause. Do you believe a full reactionary nuclear strike from the United States is going to deter someone who has a deathwish and willing to die and take all the country's people with him/her? Of course not, because their willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. There lies the fault with MAD it assumes rationality and/or a wanting to live and hold onto power. Saddam was irrational but he was never stupid enough to believe that he wouldn't pay dearly from a nuclear strike. MAD makes sense when you have two superpowers trying to build their influence throughout the world, it doesnt against a dictator with a nuke having a really bad day and genuine hatred of the US so much as to die for it.

HT

Re:Don't be too sure

[Elvis Maximus]

Personally, I hope we never have to goto war. I don't feel its a good way to solve anything but extremists and irrational people don't responsd to logic and sometimes it takes a good-old-fashioned buttkicking to get it through there heads, ie Saddam Hussein.

And how well did that work?

However there are a special breed of people who don't think about consequences of their actions and are willing to die for their cause.

How do you deal with someone that committed? Is there any good military solution to that problem? Can you solve it with outrageously expensive, unreliable, brute force technological measures?

If you want to talk about Cold War thinking, don't forget to mention building a massive defense against ICBMs. ICBMs! I can scarcely think of a more unlikely killer maniac than one who chooses to take the time, expense, and risk of developing or even purchasing ICBM technology, especially knowing full well that there's a multi-trillion dollar missile shield that might defend against it. Faced with this problem, who here would not put their warheads on a jetliner, or a suitcase, or a boat in New York harbor? ICBMs are a weapon designed for a different kind of conflict altogether.

Incidentally, do not presume that Saddam Hussein is irrational just because you don't understand his thinking. For some reason this is a common mistake.

Change...

[J.J.]

The interview on 60 Minutes was not with the Director of NSA - it was with the ex-director of NSA. How else do you think he got on 60 Minutes?

The current director, General Hayden, has made leaps and bounds in overcoming the beaucracy in the NSA in the recent years.

Things are getting better. It's difficult to create a government organization that's dynamic, flexible and responsive to changing trends in the technological sector. The NSA was at one time, and perhaps will be again.

Maybe this will help sort things out (long)

[ARR0]

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?

O/T warning

[Bob Arctor is dead]

"All war is based on deception" - Sun Tzu, China, about 5000 years ago. I believe that's the person you're supposed to credit for that timeless wisdom.

Re:O/T warning

[Infonaut]

Of course, Sun Tzu wrote about deception. But he didn't *invent it* - people were practicing it in war long before he wrote about it, and people who have never even heard of him have been writing about it and practicing it since. ;-)

Budgets are hidden in other appropriations.

[Futurepower(tm)]

It has been reported many times that the budgets of the secret agencies of the U.S. government are hidden in appropriations for other items. You and I certainly have no way of knowing how much money is spent.

The NSA is an agency that is allowed to lie. The secret agencies of the U.S. government are allowed to put mis-information in U.S. newspapers. How can you determine when they are telling the truth? I don't think you can.

There are no laws that effectively govern secret agencies, because what they do is secret. No one can know whether they lived by the law.

The NSA spies on everyone, you, me, and everyone in the world. This is an issue for everyone, not just U.S. citizens. The NSA is an agency that respects no boundaries. The NSA is part of a worldwide secret police force. It is an example of the U.S. emphasis on being adversarial rather than cooperating.

The result has been extremely expensive and devastating. The U.S. helped Saddam Hussein become strong, then killed 150,000 Iraqis when he became too strong.

We often hear about secret activities of the U.S. government after it is too late to object. The U.S. supported the killing of president Mossadegh of Iran, and supported an extremely weak man, the Shah. (See Iran 1953: Making it safe for the King of Kings), for example.) This provoked a revolution in Iran that was hostile to the U.S. Citizens of the U.S. were kept hostage. The U.S. secret agencies' secret answer to the anti-U.S. sentiment was to support Saddam Hussein of Iraq against Iran.

When executives do things openly they make lots of mistakes, and are sometimes held accountable, usually in a very peaceful way, and often by their own staffs. When executives do things in secret, there is little accountability, and the mistakes can become huge.

Not only did the U.S. kill 150,000 Iraqis, the U.S. killed more than 2,000,000 Vietnamese during its war in Vietnam. As I said in an earlier post, the U.S. has invaded 13 countries in the last 30 years.

Invading countries and killing the residents and destroying their property is not a way of relating I consider socially skilled. Why do the citizens of one country think they can kill the citizens of another? If killing is the answer, can't the U.S. ask a better question?

The interference in the affairs of other countries by the secret U.S. agencies has prompted some people to retaliate. These people who retaliate are called "terrorists" in the U.S. The terrorists make everyone in the U.S. less safe. So, U.S. citizens have, in some ways, gotten less security for the money that they spent.

The violent attitude has spread to the internal police forces in the U.S. When some religious fanatics decided to do stupid things in Waco, Texas, the U.S. government responded by bringing in very violent-minded people. The result was death.

There were people who didn't like the activities of the U.S. police forces in Waco. There were people who were psychologically de-centered by these activities. One of them bombed a U.S. government building in Oklahoma. So then the U.S. government killed him.

Secrecy encourages people not to trust. Violence encourages violence.

Secrecy in government does not work. It should be minimized or eliminated. The main issue here is not whether the NSA sometimes does terrible things, or whether one country should maintain secret police forces (the NSA and CIA and others) in all the other countries. The issue is that we have no way of knowing what secret agencies do. When what they do is wrong, they don't even need to hide their mistakes, because everything is already secret.

There in no intent in this to claim that people in the U.S. are better or worse than people anywhere. The main point is only that huge amounts of money combined with secrecy result in huge mistakes.

Re:If you know of a technically knowledgeable sena

[mikethegeek]

"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.

U.S. interference with democracy in Chile

[Futurepower(tm)]

Anyone interested in the activities of secret U.S. agencies may have been interested in a segment on the CBS show "60 Minutes" about the involvement of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the killing of Chilean General Rene Schneider. The show aired this Sunday, September 9, 2001. General Schneider was a strong supporter of democracy.

We tend to hear about the activities of secret U.S. government agencies about 30 years after they occur. What are they doing now?

Here are links to information about U.S. interference with democracy in Chile:

National Security Archive Chile Documentation Project

PBS News Hour: "... evidence of a policy to undermine democracy in Chile and to support dictatorship there"

Hinchey Report, CIA Activities in Chile