New Report On NSA Released Today

daveschroeder writes "George Washington University has today released a three-volume history of NSA activities during the Cold War (major highlights). Written by agency historian Thomas R. Johnson, the 1,000-page report, 'Cryptology During the Cold War, 1945-1989,' details some of the agency's successes and failures, its conflict with other intelligence agencies, and the questionable legal ground on which early American cryptologists worked. The report remained classified for years, until Johnson mentioned it to Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian, at an intelligence conference. Two years later, an abstract and the three current volumes of the report are now available (PDF) from GWU and the National Security Archive. Aid, author of the forthcoming history 'The Secret Sentry: The Top Secret History of the National Security Agency,' says Johnson's study shows 'refreshing openness and honesty, acknowledging both the NSA's impressive successes and abject failures during the Cold War.' A fourth volume remains classified. Johnson says in an audio interview: 'If you are performing an operation that violates a statute like FISA, it's going to come out. It always comes out.'" And reader sampas zooms in on a section in Document 6 about the growth of NSA's IT: their first Cray purchase in 1976, the growth of circuits between facilities, and internal feuds over centralized IT development vs. programmers-in-departments. "A young systems engineer named [redacted] was urging NSA to look at some technology that had been developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 1969 DARPA had developed a computer internetting system called ARPANET... NSA quickly adopted the DARPA solution. The project was called platform."

Some interesting highlights...

...are in another Wall Street Journal article [wsj.com]. On Vietnam:

The NSA's role in Vietnam has been well documented in a specific agency history by agency historian Robert J. Hanyok, who wrote of NSA's botched intelligence on the supposed second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. But Mr. Johnson's interpretation differs. Mr. Johnson hired Mr. Hanyok to expand on the more-limited treatment of the war in Mr. Johnson's history.

Mr. Hanyok finds that NSA not only made analytic errors but it also withheld information from the White House, leading White House officials to believe that there had been a second attack when there hadn't been. Mr. Johnson maintains that the NSA was "flat wrong" in reporting a second attack in the Tonkin Gulf, but he attributes it to human error not an effort to manipulate the White House. (Vol. 2, p. 583)

Another area of interest is the legal issues with which the NSA has always grappled:

Mr. Johnson's history makes clear that NSA, and its predecessors, have long grappled with legal uncertainty. "Early American cryptologists worked without the knowledge of the American public," Mr. Johnson writes of the World War I period. "They even worked without knowing if what they were doing was legal or not. It was an odd and unsettling position to be in." (Vol. 1, p. 272)

Even as Congress sought to clarify the laws on government intercept operations, the 1934 Federal Communications Act left vague whether such activities were legal. A 1950 bill amending the criminal code that then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson pushed gave legal protection to intercept activities. The NSA was created two tears later in a secret memo from President Truman, but it wasn't until 1959 that it was named in legislation.

Meanwhile, the revelation in 1960 that two NSA employees had defected to the Soviet Union in prompted multiple agency investigations. An intensive screening of agency employees turned up 26 employees believed to be homosexual who were fired. "The proceedings were not all that a civil libertarian might have wanted, but they calmed the waters enough for NSA to begin functioning again," Mr. Johnson writes. (Vol. 1, p. 284)

It wasn't until 1968 that NSA's activities were officially authorized through obscure language in a crime bill. "It did so just in time," Mr. Johnson writes. "The Watergate period and the attendant Church and Pike Committee hearings called into question all that was illegal about espionage and much of what was legal, too." (Vol. 2, p. 474)

Those hearings revealed NSA's involvement with two eavesdropping programs -- known as Shamrock and Minaret. For decades, Shamrock obtained copies of cable traffic entering or leaving the U.S., and Minaret intercepted communications of Americans who had been placed on a watchlist.

In his history, Mr. Johnson reveals that the NSA lawyer who first looked at Minaret "stated that the people involved seemed to understand that the operation was disreputable if not outright illegal." (Vol. 3, p. 85) Reports from the program were designed to look like they didn't come from NSA.

Mr. Johnson gives great credit to NSA Director Gen. Lew Allen for shutting them down, noting that the director said "the did not pass the smell test." (Vol. 3, p. 84) Mr. Johnson is openly critical of the programs, writing, for example, that Minaret "came to a well-deserved end." (Vol. 3, p. 86)

He says in an interview that NSA employees involved should have gone to their bosses and said, "Boss, if you keep doing this, you're violating the law, and you could go to jail."

Mr. Johnson, in an interview, points to the current controversy over NSA's warrantless surveillance in the wake of 9/11. He noted that he was impressed to see reports that in 2004, about two and a half years into the program, NSA lawyers began demanding to see the White House's legal justifications for the program. Their efforts along with those of some new Justice Department lawyers forced changes in the program.

Lessons of that period are directly relevant to today's debate over surveillance powers and the requirements of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted to outlaw programs like Shamrock and Minaret. "If you are performing an operation that violates a statute like FISA, it's going to come out," he says in an interview. "It always comes out."

Especially informative and interesting is an audio interview with Johnson [wsj.com] (13:29 MP3), posted along with the Wall Street Journal article. Strongly recommended.

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The cake is a [Redacted]

On an unrelated note...

everyone who clicks the links will become a person of interest to the NSA.

Re:On an unrelated note...

Having done quite a bit of research on nuclear everything (from power generation to weapons to propulsion) and then openly sharing that information with others, I'm sure I'm already a person of interest. So if you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and click away! ;-)

P.S. Gun-type bombs are easy. All you need is a critical mass of U235-- err... never mind. I seem to have guests. I'll get back to you...

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I'm sure I'm marked as well. Oh well, I always do enjoy crapping up the Signal:Noise.

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Oh, and no. You need two subcritical masses, which when shot together are critical or supercritical.

(this is nothing you can't glean from wikipedia)

Re:On an unrelated note...

The joke was that I was interrupted before I could tell you that you need to use that mass to create two equally sized hemispheres of U235. Fix one against a solid wall (e.g. the inside of a steel casing would do) and position the other a short distance away. (Preferably on some sort of guides that force it to face the other hemisphere. Again, steel casing is a good idea here.) Pack explosives behind the loose hemisphere. The explosives will thrust the loose hemisphere toward the fixed hemisphere, hopefully with enough force to compact the U235 and cause a super-critical reaction.

If you manage a super-critical reaction, then *BOOM*. If you fail at it, then no boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow.

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Heh, the hard part is getting the U235 and handling it safely. Any monkey can hop on the internet and learn what to do with it.

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Oh, come on! A little neutron radiation never hurt anybody! ... Much. ... Okay, so it slowly turned them into swiss cheese. Not to mention the gamma ray burst after they accidentally set the hemispheres too close to each other. *cough* But that's beside the point! :-P

Joking aside, I'd say the problem is even deeper than proper handling. Once it's all processed for you, shaped, and clad in a protective carton or sheath for transport, U235 is relatively harmless. It's the processing that will kill you. Proces

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I work in the intelligence community, and I can assure that most people here don't even know what /. is, let alone do they monitor what a bunch of geeks talk abou...what's that? Whoooooosh? Dammit.

Re:On an unrelated note...

Well, ex-spook here, and at my organization, I was able to peruse /. before I left. Couldn't do normal things like webmail or eBay, but apparently wasting time at /. was perfectly acceptable.

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Could you all please look at this red light?

[Redacted]

[Redacted]

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My mother was a SAINT!

Re:[Redacted]

I'm not a spook or NSA employee but it seems that the simple explination would be that they don't want to publish their personnel details much like you don't want to advertise your servers to the internet. The less information that the "bad guys" have about the internal workings of your organization, the harder it will be for them to penetrate it. In the specific case of a programmer, that programmer can be working on all sorts of highly classified projects. Even the most innocuous conversation can often times to be used to gain details about a subject.

Writes its own limerick, really.

A young systems engineer named [redacted]
Was urging the NSA to look at some [redacted]
    He [redacted] the [redacted],
    so they [redacted] in [redacted],
and [redacted] the [redacted] in [CLASSIFIED DUE TO MATTERS OF NATIONAL SECURITY].

Intesesting museum

The National Cryptologic Museum, I found it very interesting. If you are in the area you might give it an hour or two.

http://www.nsa.gov/MUSEUM/museu00009.cfm [nsa.gov]

Re:Intesesting museum

Especially when they tell you about the Wall of Honor, and the fact that there are several individuals that cannot be revealed because those missions are still classified.

But, if you do get a chance to go, play with the Enigma machine they have on display. That was something that practically blew my mind when I first encountered it in the flesh.

How about

a 3 volume history of NSA activities 2000-2008? Those would have to be much larger volumes I'm guessing.

Who cares?

'If you are performing an operation that violates a statute like FISA, it's going to come out. It always comes out.'

So what? Nobody is going to jail over it. Political coups facilitated by such activities are not reversed. Prosecutions stemming from them are not overturned. Ill-gotten gains from such information illegally used for profit are not confiscated.

So 50 years later documents are declassified and people are identified who broke the law back then. They're all dead by now.

FISA compliant operations.

If you are performing an operation that violates a statute like FISA, it's going to come out," he says in an interview. "It always comes out.

Mr. Johnson went on to explain that there were no operations that violate a statute like FISA that have not been revealed. It's futile to look for operations that violate a statute like FISA, as all of them have been revealed. No unrevealed operations violating a statue like FISA remain. All unrevealed operations comply with all statutes like FISA.

-Loyal

Re:FISA compliant operations.

Believe it or not, everything someone says, just because they are affiliated with NSA, isn't always all propaganda or misinformation.

Correct. It is also always what they want you to hear. The chief enemy of every state is it's own people, because that's the most likely entity that will end their rule.

As far as intelligence agencies and "nuanced" truth, you only have to look at Operation AJAX. We quite simply overthrew a democratic government so we could have better access to oil. If you think any modern conflict is any different, I can only ascribe it to purposeful ignorance.

Even from an intelligence standpoint, the NSA and CIA are nearly useless. They didn't predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. They missed 9/11 by a mile. When they were trying to discover whether Ho Chi Minh was taking orders from Russia or China, the most they found was a single Russian newspaper at a Vietnamese Embassy. Their end analysis? The Vietcong were so loyal they didn't even need to receive orders, they "just knew" what their communist masters wanted. I think they call it "groupthink," though political malice seems like a much easier explanation.

They are just unaccountable agencies with no oversight that serve the interests of the ruling party, and as a side benefit inject technology into private industry for the benefit of the same power center. Everything they touch is propaganda, and they have no constitutional authority to exist. So, they shouldn't. One thing has not changed since the dawn of time: concentration of power in a centralized fashion leads to corruption and misery, whether it's in a government, corporation, or your local PTA. If you cover that up with secret budgets and unaccountable violence, you shouldn't be surprised that the results are so bad.

Biggest Failure??

In the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, NSA and military spies missed the Soviets transferring a battery of offensive missiles to Cuba. That "marked the most significant failure" by government eavesdroppers to warn national leaders since World War II, Mr. Johnson wrote.

I guess 9/11 won't be included until Volumn 4 due out in 2058.

Re:Biggest Failure??

I was in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was a systems analyst for the minuteman missiles systems which carry nukes.

I was a member of the Combat Targeting team made up of three team members and our job was to program the missile's computer with target data and other information and to aim/align its guidance system optically to true north.

The half finished missile sites in Montana were taken away (literally commandeered) from Boeing and new missiles postured for use adding a larger quantity of nukes than the USSR had counted on facing.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was at its finest with the B47's ready and the B52's ready as well.

This was a time to remember.

we assumed we were going to die but did not know much about what was going on (all portable radios were confiscated) so just did our jobs to the best of our abilities.

Probably the NSA is going to look me up for sharing this.

 

If you haven't been to NSA in nearly two decades

...and even then, only did so as a guest/contractor, then you have no idea about what is going on at NSA currently.

Computing under DOD has always been an exercise in maintaining extreme reliability, sometimes at the cost of (perceived) modernization. Many enterprise organizations still use several-year-old, proven systems because that's what's reliable and that's what works. And what ignorant managers proudly attest to in any organization is usually separated by a gulf from reality.

But you're right: things have changed. There's a lot of old technology all over the military and the IC, but there is also a lot of conventional modern -- and even "bleeding edge" -- gear. The mindset has drastically changed from "must be built here" to the extensive use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions. And that was already happening in the mid- to late-1990s.

Funny you should mention universities -- academia is simultaneously a fantastic dinosaur zoo of its own, and simultaneously a breeding ground for some of the most exciting and groundbreaking work. NSA has long had this same duality. If you saw the NSA of the last 10-15 years, you'd be surprised at the technology in play -- warts and all.