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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."
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.
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...
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
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.