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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.