NSA Overwhelmed with Information

puppet wrote to us with a CNN article that's currently running. Apparently, the NSA is drowning in information. The agency supposedly has too many targets, too much info and cannot sift through all of it. So, here's to sending out thousands of bogus signals for them to sort through! *grin*

Comments

NSA Distributed Client

[Anonymous Coward]

If they make a distributed client at NSA, we could help them process all that delicious information. I'd love to get my hands on other people's secrets.

The New World Order

[The Dodger]

The British Empire once stretched across the globe and it wasn't until Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese that the sun finally set on it. The UK used to be the most powerful nation in the world, but it is no longer, and that realisation was a hard one to swallow. It's only recently that the Brits have begun to lose their superiority complex, characterised, for example, by their reluctance to fully participate in the European Union.

However, they did eventually come to realise that Britain was no longer a global superpower, and the UK is now doing quite well for itself, that-you-very-much. They no longer rely on brute force to achieve what they want. Practically everyone knows the SAS' motto: Who Dares Wins. That typifies the British attitude which resulted in them standing firm against tyrannic regimes such as Nazi Germany and Iraq. Less well know is the Special Boat Squadron, an elite force which draws it's members from the Royal Marines (think of it as the UK equivalent of the SEALs). The SBS motto is: Not by Strength, By Guile. The UK continues to exert immense geopolitical influence by dint of it's diplomatic and intelligence assets, which it utilises in a subtle manner. Lacking the brute strength to effectively bully or intimidate other nations into doing what it wants, the UK uses less obvious, more sneaky methods to achieve it's aims.

So what has this got to do with the NSA? I hear you cry. Well, I think that the United States of America is going to have to face the same reality as the UK had to - that it no longer has the capability to ake problems disappear by simply throwing resources at them. Just as the Web levelled the playing field in terms of business, allowing companies like Amazon to appear overnight, the sociological, technological and economic developments which have occured since the end of the Cold War are levelling the playing field in a much wider range of areas, from economic to military/intelligence.

The NSA doesn't need to get stronger. It needs to get smarter. It needs to understand better how to pursue it's aims, within the big picture of the world at the beginning of the 21st century. If it tries to cling on to it's position, using the old methods, it will get swept away. Only by adapting to the New World Order (for want of a better phrase), can it survive and continue to fulfil it's mission.

Let's face it guys - even though you all bitch about the NSA, Echelon, the CIA, etc., you all know that they do a lot to protect your way of life. There are entire nations for whom 'Death to America!' is a perfectly legitimate political declaration. Fair enough, there are situations where the intelligence community has overstepped it's mark, but do you really think they give a flying f**k about a bunch of Linux-loving, long-haired nerds?

D.
..is for Dangerous.

Why the NSA is so big...

[trims]

When people look at the leaked numbers supposing to approximate the budget of NSA (last I saw, the estimate was in the $20billion range) and the number of people (maybe 30,000 or so), everyone seems to assume that they're all codebreaking wizards. This is stupid - it's like assuming that the CIA is full of James Bond people. What people seem to forget is what the money actually goes to, and you'll see why the NSA is having problems keeping up with it's mission:

• Huge chunks of the budget go to the development, manufacture, and maintenance of reconisance satellites. While the NRO shares responsibility for operational use and control of many of these satellites, these puppies cost as much as $2billion a pop to MAKE. With the increasing demand by the US Armed Services for realtime battlefield data, the NSA has had to increase the number of satellites it orbits. Last time I looked, we had something like 8 KH-11 (and followon) low-orbit visual sats, at least two dozen radio-intercept sats, at least that many radar sats, and maybe a dozen other types. Figuring that each one costs on the order of $1billion to develop/make/launch/maintain, and you use it for about a decade before it's gone, around $8 billion each year goes to simply running the satelite section of the NSA.
• Vast numbers of NSA employees are working as liasons with other Federal Agencies. CIA, DIA, FBI, DOJ (oh, yeah, them too), and the various Armed Services Intelligence sections all have substantial "NSA" people working with them. This has gotten alot "worse" (from the NSA prospective), since virtually none of the other organizations has the kind of experience the NSA has, and have been calling on the NSA more and more for assistance. Most of the FBI knowledge about hacking, cracking, and sigint has been from the NSA. And they're getting tapped for help from people that 10 years ago they never would have dreamed of being require to talk to: FAA, DOT, FEMA, and even the Dept of Agriculture.
• In the last decade, with the rise of the Internet, the NSA has started to run field operations, something they never had to do before on any real scale. Alot of this is in conjunction with the FBI and law enforcement, but there's involvement with FEMA and even things like the DOE and NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission). Alot of these teams are doing security auditing (ala "Sneakers"), but even more are simply helping the department in question set up proper defences and auditing proceedures. Never underestimate the cost (in dollars, people, and beauracracy) of running a real field operations branch.

With all these extra "duties" that people seem to forget about, I doubt that the NSA spends more than $1b on actual codebreaking each year. And, from the people I know that are involved in some of this, I've gleanned something that I think is significant: While I believe that the NSA retains probably a 10-year lead in the mathematics of cryptography, they have now less than 2 years lead in actual hardware Moore's Law has been very hard on the NSA. While they used to be able to count on having not only unheard-of advances in crypto knowledge but much, much faster and more advanced computers, they now no longer have the significantly advanced machinery. Being perhaps only a single interation ahead, rather than 4 or 5, cuts their advantage down by an order of magnitude.

So, you get an organization that faces an explosion of new requirements, heavier demands in it's old field(s), and a decrease in technological advantage over it's opponents, and well, Things Are Not Going Well At The NSA.

Mind you, they're still very sharp, and what they put their mind and resources to, I'm pretty sure will happen; the problem is now, that in order to focus on a problem, they end up neglecting other areas.

Fun, Fun, Fun!

-Erik

Disclaimer: I do not work for the NSA (or, at least, I can't say so...)