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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)
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.
If you have a problem with my views, REPLY, don't moderate!
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.
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.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
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.
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!
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. 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.
Bush's education improvements were
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
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.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
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.
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.
Oh, yes and it gets way better.. from the FAQ..
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...
> 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.
Visit the
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!
Bush's education improvements were
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 =)
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
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
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.
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 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.
Bush's education improvements were
"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