http://cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,266857-412,00.shtml
- The Largest Spy Agency Falls Behind
- Secret Operation Opens Up About Its Needs To Advance
- Soviets' Technology Was Easier To Crack Than Bin Laden's
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The
NSA's epicenter
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News cameras have never been allowed inside - until now: Correspondent David Martin provides a look at America's most secret spy agency, which is located on 350 acres, south of Baltimore, studded with giant antennas and protected by barbed wire and guard dogs.
A phone call intercepted by the NSA is often the first warning that a terrorist like Osama bin Laden is planning an attack against Americans. To find that threatening phone call, email or radio transmission among the billions made daily, the NSA relies on rooms of supercomputers.
But the NSA has fallen on difficult times. In January 2000, General Mike Hayden, the director of the NSA, got a call from the agency's watch officer alerting him that all of its computers had crashed.
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"He told me that our computers were down," Hayden recalls. "We were dark. Our ability to process information was gone."
As much of the East Coast dug out from a surprise snowstorm, Hayden went on closed circuit television to warn his work force what was at stake.
"I said, 'This is secret. This can't be the second half of a sentence that begins, 'Honey, you won't believe what happened to me at work today,'" Hayden says.
"NSA headquarters was brain dead. We had some residual ability at our locations around the world, but I don't want to trivialize this. This was really bad," Hayden remembers.
The computers were back up in three and a half days, but there was no denying the enormity of what had happened. The NSA's problems went beyond overworked computers. But almost none of this was understood outside the highly secretive organization.
Does the NSA eavesdrop? "We're involved in signals intelligence," explains Hayden, the NSA director.
Signals intelligence means operating listening posts all over the world to intercept billions of radio transmissions, phone calls, emails and faxes and to uncover terrorist plots and other foreign threats to the United States.
But the NSA will never reveal what all these antennas are listening to.
"If the target didn't think he or she was communicating privately, they wouldn't communicate," Hayden says. "The key to this business is actually doing what your adversary believed to be impossible."
At the epicenter of the NSA, intercepted communications are continually funneled through an operations center directed by Richard Beraradino. The NSA hears what some of our adversaries are saying as they say it, or as Beraradino puts it, "intelligence that's flowing from the horse's mouth."
Conversations of air defense gunners preparing to take a shot at an American plane over Iraq are monitored and warnings are sent out via a top-secret chat room.
The NSA has a gamut of security devices to protect its secrets. There is a finger identification system and scanners that can recognize eyeballs.
Office keys are never taken home; they're issued by machine each morning. Some of what goes on here is straight out of a James Bond movie. Dave Murley is working on a computer that can recognize a face. It would only allow access for authorized users.
At the NSA even the trash is a government secret. The NSA gets rid of 40,000 pounds of classified documents each day, by recycling them into pulp shipped off to become pizza boxes.
Until recently NSA employees were forbidden to tell their neighbors or families their profession.
On any given day, the majority of intelligence that shows up in the president's morning briefing comes from NSA, considered by many to be the cornerstone of American intelligence.
Some might therefore be alarmed to read a report by a team of NSA insiders concluding that the "NSA is in great peril."
"We're behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution," Hayden declares.
The NSA is now trying to play catch-up to Silicon Valley and the cell phones and computers that have proliferated all over the world.
"In the previous world order, our primary adversary was the Soviet Union," Hayden explains. "Technologically we had to keep pace with an oligarchic, resource-poor, technologically inferior, overbureaucratized, slow-moving nation-state."
"Our adversary communications are now based upon the developmental cycle of a global industry that is literally moving at the speed of light,...cell phones, encryption, fiber optic communications, digital communications," he adds.
Documents introduced at the trial of the four men accused of blowing up two American embassies in Africa indicate that the NSA was monitoring Osama bin Laden's satellite phone as he allegedly directed preparations for the attack from his hiding place in Afghanistan. Even so the NSA was unable to collect enough intelligence to stop it.
"Osama bin Laden has at his disposal the wealth of a $3 trillion-a-year telecommunications industry," Hayden says.
The NSA's nightmare is terrorists like Osama bin Laden using technology developed in the United States to hide their plans to attack Americans.
One way they can do it is via a software program to make messages unreadable.
An independent computer programmer, Phil Zimmermann, developed the program, which he calls Pretty Good Privacy. He distributes it for free on the Internet as a protest against government surveillance.
"We don't want to leave behind the privacy that we enjoyed before all this new technology came in," Zimmerman says.
This is cryptography for the masses. "I can't think of a way of making it available to the good guys without also making it available to the bad guys," Zimmerman says.
So a person who wants to protect their credit card number has the same access to Pretty Good Privacy as a terrorist. "It bothers me a great deal but I don't know how to solve that problem," he says.
And that's a big problem for the NSA.
"There are a lot of unbreakable (codes), and we keep working on them to change them into the breakable category," says Bob Bogart, who teaches a beginner's code-breaking class at the NSA, but computer-generated codes like Pretty Good Privacy are light-years beyond that.
It can be very frustrating to work on a code that is theoretically unbreakable, Bogart says. "I know people that have worked on codes...and ciphers, for decades."
Is Zimmermann's Pretty Good Privacy unbreakable? "It may be unbreakable, but we may be able to break it, who knows," he says.
"The longer they think that, the more they'll use it, and then...the more of a chance we have to break it," Zimmerman says.
The best code breakers tend to be people with musical aptitude, which explains all the bands at the NSA.
But it also takes supercomputers - some of them capable of performing more than 1 trillion operations per second - to help decipher unreadable jumbles of letters and numbers.
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When he became director two years ago, Hayden commissioned two studies of the organization and received a scathing indictment of a stagnant and unwieldy government bureaucracy: There is "confusion and paralysis," the reports said. "We have run out of time."
Instead of hiding the problems, Hayden made sure those scathing reports were circulated inside and outside the NSA.
Hayden is working to tear down some of the NSA's high walls of secrecy. Those walls kept the NSA's secrets safe but they also kept out the ideas and innovations the agency needs to stay vital, he says.
So far, his transformation is still a work in progress: "This is about an agency that's grown up in one world, learned a way to succeed within that world and now finds itself in another world, and it's got to change if it hopes to succeed in that universe," Hayden says.
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