Slashdot Mirror
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)..
Canadian War Museum has one too, for those who are closer to Ottawa than Maryland.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
They should add a Blackberry banned from the United Arab Emirates. Presumably just a fast streaming cipher of some kind? AES is pretty fast, so that just leaves the key generation. More to the point, why would UAE presume the Blackberry was crackable? Because the NSA insists on half-baked security in older phones?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
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.
When I last went to the National Cryptologic Museum (2002?) they had at least a half-dozen Enigma machines on display, including the rarer 4-rotor Kriegsmarine version. But the really cool thing was that besides the ones behind glass, they had one in the open that you could actually use.
They even had some scratch paper and golf pencils nearby for writing out and passing encrypted messages.
I've seen a number of Enigmas behind glass but had never laid hands on one until visiting this museum. I hope it's still set up this way and they haven't removed the hands-on enigma.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Also interesting and relevant is that a Navajo to Japanese dictionary wouldn't help. The Code Talkers used a code within a code, with their language being only the first layer. They also used a combination of standard military/intelligence community "talking code" (basically obscuring the meaning of phrases by referring to code words instead of places, people, or operations), and the simple fact that they had to reinterpret the language to include all the modern warfare technology and techniques they were imparting, to make most of the Code Talk incomprehensible to even native Navajo speakers. While not Code Talkers were ever captured alive, a number of regular Navajo troops were, and none could ever decode the signals Japanese intelligence forced them to listen to.
The Navajo that originally developed the Code Talk were clever on a number of levels. It really was a nearly perfect code. The only way to decode it would be to find a fluent speaker of the language (rare as Hell outside the tribe) who also happened to be an expert on codes and decoding messages (practically unheard of outside of the Code Talkers themselves).
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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.
And the Jeffersonian Cipher, as well as early copies of a bunch of old coding books. It's a terrific museum staffed primarily by ex-NSA people.
I think you are joking.
I doubt U.S. government would want something from us. First, we have already been to U.S. 2 years ago (on a similar business trip). Second, most of the U.S. secrets (I mean industrial) have been already outsourced to other countries, including mine (consider our company). So, all in all, I think two foreigners visiting a museum are pretty harmless to U.S. national security.
BTW. The U.S. is actually a nice place. There is more corruption in our country anyway. I think most Americans are overreacting to government powers, even though I agree that the situation is getting worse there (especially the class divide).
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 *
Do any of the museums let you play with the enigma?
I was lucky enough to play with a Kommando 3+reverser dial enigma. The first thing I did was press L L L L L L L L L L L ... L which mightly impressed the librarian who looks after the collection of old crypto gear. An enigma will never lightup the same character as the key pressed. This enigma was owned by some organisation that I forget and rarely had a drooling nerd giving it the once over.
The point is that there are lots of hidden away secret caches of old crypto equipment that are kept as momentos from successful operations and never see the light of day. Of course, like the enigma itself, there are crypto units that are not disclosed because they have been cracked and are still in use by the public. The banking system used enigma until the 1950's even though the UK could decrypt messages effectively a decade before. (do you believe that collossus was really shut down?)
Typical german quality though, the woodwork on the case was fabulous and even 70 years later the lid shuts perfectly. The woodwork had inlaid coloured wood in it not unlike an ornate coffee table; I can only suppose that later enigma were a bit more rushed into production. The wee light bulbs had frosted ends so that cold russian front fingers can unscrew and change the bulbs. Although, if a bulb did go then some poor operator would have to carefully unscrew each bulb and test it in a little tester bulb slot. The operator would then have to do the crypto exercise again because the dials would have to be reset. Every key on the keyboard worked with a smooth action, not unlike a well oiled 1970's typewriter but they had quite a large depression so you could never have touch typed on this. I imagine soldiers on the front lines would have been trained for accuracy rather than efficiency so they probably typed with 1 finger and recorded each lit up character with a pencil and pad one at a time.
It was really heavy. Given that this was a Kommando unit then it probably was lugged about in comms vehicle (I wasn't told the back story) but I doubt that these were used in a ditch on a battlefield.
In my excitement, I can't remember of each dial rotated, or parts of the dial rotated on each keypress - there was a solid clunk and the sound of mechanical movement on each keypress; I would imagine that this would rotate the cipher on each keypress to make it harder to crack. The box had different dials in it - presumably from other machines or replacement units. Each had gears on it and neat wiring - and weighed about 2 lbs.
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.
I don't know what the rules are at the museum but the NSA had a booth at the RSA conference this year and they brought an Enigma with them. They allowed me to use it and it seemed to be in full working order. Dials rotated and the keys made the lights come on. You could even open it up and see the internal mechanism. It was an amazing experience to physically touch a piece of history like that--one of the highlights of the conference for me. A colleague of mine who is fluent in German was reading the instructions which mentioned that there was a printer that could be used with the device--something I hadn't heard before.
We owe a great debt to the code breakers at Bletchley Park like Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman and the Poles like Marian Rejewski who paved the way for them. Not only did they help win WWII and save countless lives, but they also planted the seeds for modern computer science in the process.
The banking system used enigma until the 1950's even though the UK could decrypt messages effectively a decade before. (do you believe that collossus was really shut down?)
Collossus wasn't used to crack Enigma - it was used to crack messages from Lorenz machines, which were more complicated than Enigma. The amazing thing is that the cryptologists at Bletchley were able to figure out the way the machine worked having never seen one (indeed, they didn't see one for over 2 years after cracking it) due to an error by a machine operator. But yes, I do believe it was really shut down and evidence destroyed - that's why it took so many years of painstaking reconstruction from photographs and human memory to rebuild one of the things...
The dials on an Engima rotate btw rather than parts inside of them. Each rotation of the wheels causes different pathways through the rotors to be used, thus changing the output - IIRC you can see the wiring inside some of the rotors at both the NSA museum, and the equally amazing Bletchley Park Museum in the UK (http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/)
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!
They have more than one Enigma - in fact they have several working machines out in the open (no pun) that you can operate yourself which is way cool. Several varieties in cases, including a Japanese model. Some displays about the Navaho code talkers; African-American code quilt; some antique books on cryptology; bunch of common networking cryptos (KG-46s and the like, including remnants of a space-based one that was recovered from a launch vehicle failure); crypto-enabled cell phones. And of course an instance of the Cryptologic Bombe - the enormous electromechanical WWII machine that was used for brute-force Enigma cracking (based on the work of Rejewski, Turing, and the others at Bletchley Park). And, in the gift shop, you can get some cool stuff with the NSA logo on it ... walk into your next meeting with all your notes in a nice NSA folder and see what kind of comments you get!
My friend Debbie Ann is so promiscuous, instead of an appointment book she needs a package manager
Not to be an ass. But you only have yourself to fault for that. Seriously. What were you thinking?