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NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum
Schneier writes "Most people might not be aware of it, but there's a National Cryptologic Museum at Ft. Meade, at NSA Headquarters. It's hard to know its exact relationship with the NSA. Is it part of the NSA, or is it a separate organization? Can the NSA reclassify things in its archives?" There's some interesting stuff in the comments about the building's reason for existence (window views a nearby NSA building?) and some stuff they have (an Enigma machine!).
Very cool museum, I think I even saw Brian Kernighan there talking to what looked like young VC types.. Here's some pics I snapped..
http://www.thoughtcrime.com/NSA%20Museum/Site/NSA%20Museum%20visit.html
We had a Storagetek silo like the one on display at my current corp, but spec'd out with LTO3 or LTO4.. I'm thinking NSA had one just like it but 10+ years earlier (and with older tape tech of course)..
As a foreigner I know this museum.
I was actually detained by de NSA for fotographing the NSA building itself.
I'm still waiting for them to send back my CF card...
There is also an Enigma Machine at the museum of science and industry in Chicago right next to the sub, I don't know of any other displays off the top of my head that could by at a museum solely dedicated to cryptography.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
Most people might not be aware of it
Yes, because it's hidden down a road with potholes large enough to lose a small semi in. And to get to it, you need to all but drive up to the scary looking gates of the NSA before turning down said hidden road.
The NSA has a virtual tour of the place on their website. Not exactly an immersible VRML experience or anything, but pretty nice none the less. There are also some nice videos in the flash frame on the main page, including a pretty cool overview of the 2009 CDX contest between the various military academies. The Press release for 2010 notes that Navy won this year (apparently in 2009, NSA Red Cell hacked Navy's website to say "we heart army" as one of their first actions, which probably had them motivated a little bit more this year).
They actually have a lot of publicly available information and seem to be making great steps towards demystifying their image and trying to un-do some recent damage. They're not anything like 'Enemy of the State'.
Yes, they can. Classification typically lapses after 25 years unless reviewed and extended, and while it's easy to extend classification, in practice it lapses on a lot of stuff. That doesn't mean they put it on a website or in the museum, but it's open to FOIA requests at that point.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
On 16 December 1993, the National Cryptologic Museum (NCM) opened its doors to the public...
It's a great museum. They have lots of historically significant crypto devices, including 5 or 6 enigmas machines of various types. They also have several "used" supercomputers, including a Cray Y-MP, and a the wonderful-looking Connection Machine CM5.
You know you are in the right place when the receptionist informs you that you can use the Enigma machine while you wait for the next tour group to start. Dig around in their library and look for books printed on line paper, that's the stuff you won't find anywhere else. Oh yea, the tour guides are also recruiters if you think you got what it takes.
About 15 years ago the NSA guys on exchange would brag that they has an Enigma on display and all the CSE had was the Cray loveseat.
The NSA has one of the largest cryptographic collections in the world IMHO. So, it's not much of a surprise that some of the "old stuff" is in a museum.
They have a live family of bigfoots living in cages in the basement.
The National Cryptographic Museum is where an old motel used to be (Colony 7 motel) and is a pretty cool place to visit. The Enigma works and you can spin the rotors, type, and encrypt/decrypt messages.
Nearby is the National Vigilance Park, which has some cold war recon aircraft on display.
Being a geek you might as well do the multi-stage geocache which starts at the NVP. The NVP and nearby "unclassified" parking lot have a view of NSA buildings, and typically NSA police are quite visible patrolling the area.
And if you have time, cruise up to the BWI area and visit the National Electronics Museum.
I would like to get there with a colleague during our upcoming business trip (if it will be approved - we are Czechs working for American company with office near Washington). However, the opening hours in the museum are quite unfriendly - basically only during the week (we will be at work), plus 1st and 3rd Saturday in month for 4 hours. We hope we will get on Saturday there, will have to plan accordingly.
even if it looks like a converted old school Howard Johnson motel of sorts! They actually have a lot of interesting stuff on display, besides an actual enigma machine that you can play with!
Interesting details that I noticed when I went this past summer: ;)
1) My car (and phone!) GPS suddenly drops dead and gets nothing in terms of signal.. it's like we drove off the planet or something! The onboard GPS had to resort to using car instrumentation data to give us a rough guesstimate of where we are - which we thought was really funny!
2) There's a sign by the main entrance to the NSA there that basically says don't even think about taking any pictures, even of the sign itself that says don't take any pictures!! Note: You make a left right at the main entrance to the parking lots to follow the side road to the museum while passing a permanently parked fighter jet and a gas station right before you get to it. It's really non-descript!
3) At the gift shop - we decided to buy a few things and charged it on the credit card.. when we got home and looked at the receipt - it doesn't even say NSA museum - it had some totally different name to it!
4) Also, they had a totally cheap and reasonable soda and snack machines tucked to the side of the entrance once you walk in! Totally surprising - but nice
and Incidentally, if you're thinking about going to the spy museum in downtown washington DC - *DON'T DO IT!* - it's an absolute travesty and waste of i think it was like $15? The NSA museum blows it away in terms of information and goodies to be seen - and WAYYYYYYYYYyyyyy cheaper too! The spy museum in DC is for kids. The NSA museum is for true Geeks!
i went there in 2000, on a trip from the UK. was driving though MD and saw signs to Fort Meade. got lost and ended up rocking up at the main NSA entrance. halfway through security i said "christ, im only here for the museum". at which point the friendly guards laughed and pointed me in the right way.
of course, this was before "the accident". had i been doing that a year later i'm guessing my stay at the NSA would have been considerably longer....
how times change. i genuinely long for the old days before the U.S got broken and chose to take the world down with it.
I have the tee shirt to prove it.
Lots of interesting cold war information there too. Most Americans don't know how many service men died collecting sigint during period from after WWII until the late 1980's
It is cool that they have Enigma machines, but they aren't the only place, even in the US. I recently saw two Enigma machines at The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, that were captured on the U505 sub. See wikipedia for more locations.
The absolute best job I ever had was a codebreaker at NSA in the mid 70's when I was with the Army Security Agency. Critical mission, challenging brain-straining job, and the most advanced computers on the planet to play with. Have never been to the museum but imagine it would bring back some memories. Most people immediately think "Oh boy, Enigma!", but that is only the most public of the items, and not necessarily the most interesting. My proudest possession is the Dundee Orange Marmalade jar that I still keep on my desk. You either know what that means, or you don't.
Where's the typical "NSA is evil, make sure to wear your tinfoil hat, go there and get put on their most wanted list" rants?
I have been there twice. Really interesting to any geek that likes computer history. One time I got into the museum and remembered I forgot to lock the doors on my truck. I mentioned it to an employee there and he said, "Oh, I wouldn't worry. It's being watched".
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The day I went, a few years ago, I was fortunate because there was a busload of visitors there the same day (Daughters of the Revolution? Young Republicans? I don't know who they were). They had an official museum tour guide who gave a lot of history and details about what was in the exhibits, way more than was available on the displays alone. I was able to tag along and listen to it all. If at all possible, I urge you to see about getting a group together (through your workplace, school, boy scout troop, whatever) and getting such a guided tour.
On another note, before the group got there, the museum had a few visitors. All of them with haircuts which leads me to believe they were military in civvies, and all of them discussing the exhibits in whispers!
No, I didn't break *in* -- I broke the museum. I was standing near an exhibit of a tape library robot, busily moving tapes around, and the control panel was right out there where anyone could fiddle with it. I pushed a button -- I don't remember which one -- and the robot arm reset to its rest position and stopped. I moved away from the exhibit before anyone saw me. A week later the museum closed and didn't reopen for almost a year. So that must have been one important tape library. Sorry.
My parents stayed at the Colony 7 hotel on the first night of their honeymoon...
I went there. My wife tried to find a shirt with the NSA logo that was made in the US. They don't sell them.
I guess I when I was there in 2001 it was before they put an Enigma in for folks to play with.
It's a great idea to get a tour from a dosant. Ours was ex-NSA, and the commentary is was fantastic. There's more than one Enigma there, and also the American version of the Cryptographic Bombe, which broke the 4-wheeled Enigma code. Brings a whole new meaning to "brute force computing".
"Is it part of the NSA, or is it a separate organization?"
If you don't know the answer to the simple puzzles, why would you bother to go and look at the complex ones? :)
-Charlie
... when I visited my brother (he lives in Arlington, VA) last year he insisted we visit the museum. I said "sure, why not". I was really glad we did. Lots of great history there, and lots of hardware, too. As a previous poster said, you are able to and encouraged to play with an Enigma machine. Great photos and artifacts and whatnot. I was surprised just how interesting and informative it was - highly recommended to anyone visiting the area.
I am at MathFest 2010 in Pittsburgh right now, and there is an NSA / Cryptological Museum booth. They brought an Enigma machine from 1943 and let us play with it. Also: free pencils. Yay!
I haven't read all of the comments, but I'll chime in as an Anonymous Coward.
Once upon a time, the museum was a hotel. The agency grew, and worries were put forward about um....people in the hotel and their location in re the new buildings. Ahem. The stories we've heard...
So, the building was purchased and made into a museum. Cool place, we like to take visiting relatives there. They do indeed have an Enigma machine. I'm pretty sure they have a Purple machine as well. (yeah, I can google it, but why?)
For those of us Anonymous Cowards who are...shall we say...residents of the area, we were astounded when they put up an exit sign for the agency and also one for the museum. Amazing for those of us used to not admitting it exists.
Enough to take a 3/8" thick book to show the pictures of. My Dad, who worked for NRL, did a lot of the early development work on vocoders. Not the crypto parts, just the parts that render speech into fewer bits for later encryption. So if you go there, look for the vocoders, and the EVA (electronic voice analog) which I myself had a part in developing -- long before there were IC computers things like this were a little tricky. It ran in the family, I wound up writing codecs and protocols that are now used in cel phones and online. The EVA played from a chart we drew on with conductive ink -- a multichannel analog memory on velum we played back by rolling a wirewound power resistor over it. The traces had information on pitch, noise, formant frequencies and Q's and so on -- this thing played back speech that sounded like the original speaker and only needed a few hundred bits/second to work (making the crypto a lot easer for obvious reasons). If you needed to edit the chart, you'd just take an exacto knife, knock off the silver paint, re paint, and good to go. It was fun playing with chart speed and direction to make the speaker talk fast, slow or backwards without changing anything else about the sound. The analyzer that produced the bits in the first place took two large racks of boards based on Ge transistor my Dad designed and built -- and he was a good tech too, it's purty. We really didn't have opamps then, other than Philbrick tube types (not suitable for airplanes or tanks) so for making formant filters for speech generation, we used some special inductors that could be tuned with a current, made by UTC. By varying the current, you could change the inductance via a non linear u in the special core material, without changing Q too much, they were cool, and I still have a mini vocoder that runs off a joystick and switch/pot input we used on some of our early rock and roll recordings. (we didn't give NSA all the good stuff...) Some of the other cool stuff is miniature radios, some things we found we don't even know what they are, some special navy comm system things, signal analyzers and so forth. Only a geek could love some of this. We had so much when Dad died (plenty to keep my busy for the rest of my own life if I only played with just that, which I don't) we gave it to NSA so other people could admire it. Enjoy! Now I do other things -- www.coultersmithing.com
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Schneier's popularity must be going down as this is not even news much less new news. Yes it is a nice place and one day I would like to look at the 40+ year old hardware they have there, but why would I?