by Tim Shorrock
Inside, you can see parts of the U-2 that was shot down over Soviet territory in 1960 and tributes to the officers and crewmembers killed on the USS Liberty, an NSA spy ship that was attacked by Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Other exhibits are dedicated to the USS Pueblo, the NSA spy ship captured by North Korea in 1968, and the VENONA program, a World War II surveillance program that intercepted Soviet diplomatic communications and helped identify a handful of Soviet spies in the United States. For computer buffs, the museum houses several models of the first computers used by the NSA to handle the massive amounts of data scooped up by the agency’s global network of radars and satellites. Here, a visitor begins to appreciate the important role corporations have played in the history of signals intelligence. Among the machines on display is a 1976 HARVEST data-processor designed for the NSA by a consortium of companies that included IBM, RCA, Sperry Rand, Philco, and General Electric. It sits next to an XMP-24 supercomputer built by Cray Research Inc., which was, according to NSA literature, “arguably the most powerful computer in the world” when it was delivered in 1983. Once installed, the NSA used the Cray computer as its operation center for a global computer network that linked “into a single cyber-web” all of the NSA’s listening posts around the world as well as those operated by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the NSA’s closest ally. Next to the XMP-24 is the SIGSALY, the first secure voice encryption system for telephones, invented and built by Bell Labs.
“NSA has been a silent partner with private industry from the earliest days of postwar computer development,” a museum handout says. Indeed, many experts agree that advanced computing owes its very existence to its early funding from the NSA, which bought the first two or three of every computer produced by Control Data, IBM, General Electric, Cray, RCA, and other leading companies.10
With the assistance of these companies, by the end of the 1960s the NSA had broken many of the Soviet Union’s most sophisticated codes, including diplomatic traffic from Moscow to the Soviet embassy in Washington. By the time Richard Nixon occupied the White House, NSA eavesdroppers were listening to the telephone conversations of Soviet leaders as they drove in limousines to and from the Kremlin.11 In one celebrated operation during the 1970s, NSA divers placed a tap on a Soviet communications cable on the ocean floor north of Japan; the NSA used it to listen in on sensitive Soviet military communications until 1981, when the operation was blown by Ronald W. Pelton, an NSA analyst on the payroll of the KGB. In another espionage feat, the NSA secretly rigged encryption machines sold by a Swiss firm, Crypto AG, to more than 120 governments around the world, thus gaining access to secret diplomatic and military communications sent to and from top officials of dozens of countries, including such prime U.S. targets as Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia.12
In its heyday, the NSA had close to 100, 000 employees monitoring communications from hundreds of sites around the world. But the end of the Cold War brought that era to a close, and new enemies to the fore. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the NSA’s budget was drastically cut back, and the agency shut down twenty of its forty-two radio listening posts around the world.13 In the intervening years, the agency was forced to reengineer its operations for a new world of espionage in which the primary subjects of U.S. intelligence were no longer the static armies of the Soviet Union and its allies, but a globally dispersed network of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and insurgent groups opposed to U.S. policy in the Middle East, Israel, and Asia.
The contours of the NSA’s new world were sketched out in June 2007 by Air Force General Michael Hayden, who led the NSA during the transition out of the Cold War era and is now the director of the CIA. When U.S. intelligence assessed Soviet power during the Cold War, he told the National Guard Association of the United States, “we tracked troop movements, fighter wings, ICBMs, big stuff.” In that context, the enemy “was easy to find” but “hard to finish,” making firepower more important strategically than intelligence. But in the war on terror, he argued, that equation has been reversed. “Our enemy is easy to finish, he’s just very, very hard to find,” said Hayden. “Today we’re looking for individuals or small groups: groups planning suicide bombings; running violent jihadist websites; sending foreign fighters into Iraq; acting as conduits between al Qaeda and potential nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons experts. We can see why the drive for intelligence is paramount in this post-9/11 world. Our mission as intelligence officers is to locate the threat, identify precisely who it is and what their intentions are so that we can bring the full resources and capabilities of our nation to bear before the enemy strikes.”14
Thus has the role of intelligence changed, particularly for the NSA and its sister collection agencies. Gail Phipps, a former NSA official who is the executive vice president of CACI International, refers to the new science of espionage as “exquisite intelligence.” “We need to be able to pinpoint a person or a cell and be 99 percent confident that we know where they are, and in exact time,” she says. “That’s very different from the type of analysis systems we put together in the past.”15
Until 9/11, few Americans were aware that the NSA was the fulcrum of a global system built around the government’s relentless drive to intercept virtually every radio signal, telephone conversation, e-mail, and fax transmission on earth. But from time to time there were hints of the agency’s enormous powers. During the 1990s, for example, the NSA’s global eavesdropping system became a source of a serious political spat with Europe. In 1997, Margaret Newsham, a contract engineer working for Lockheed Space and Missile Corporation at an NSA listening post in the United Kingdom, disclosed to Congress the existence of Echelon, a global surveillance network run by the NSA and its counterparts in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. She made the disclosure after hearing NSA intercepts of international calls placed by Senator Strom Thurmond, the conservative Republican from South Carolina. Her revelations sparked a spate of inquiries in Congress about whether the NSA was illegally listening in on domestic conversations. The discussions, led by a Republican civil libertarian, Representative Bob Barr of Georgia, presaged the intense debate that would follow the revelations about President Bush’s Terrorist Surveillance Program in 2005.*
In July 1998, a report commissioned by the European Parliament confirmed that, through Echelon, the United States and its closest allies had the capability to intercept most European phone calls, e-mails, and data communications, as well as the technology to decode almost any encrypted communication. This sparked deep suspicion in European capitals that Echelon was being used by the NSA to capture European business intelligence and trade secrets and pass them on to U.S. companies. But the issue never captured the attention of the American public, in part because senior intelligence officials, led by Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, denied the European reports and flatly refused to give credence to the parliamentarians’ findings. “The notion that we collect intelligence to promote American business interests is simply wrong,” Tenet told Congress in April of 2000 (he went on to say, however, that SIGINT “has provided information about the intentions of foreign businesses, some operated by governments, to violate US laws or sanctions or to deny US businesses a level playing field”).16*
Another incident involving the NSA three months into President George W. Bush’s first term triggered the administration’s first foreign policy crisis. In April 2001, a Chinese fighter plane collided with a Lockheed EP-3E signals reconnaisance plane about seventy miles off the Chinese island of Hainan. The collision caused the death of the Chinese pilot, and the U.S. spy plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Hainan. The EP-3E was part of a secret unit, operated by the Navy for the NSA, which monitors the Pacific skies from bases in Japan, Okinawa, and Alaska; but the Chinese government complained that it had flown over its “air territory.” The plane and its crew were returned after several weeks of negotiations, and the crisis was
defused and quickly forgotten. Still, it served as a reminder of the NSA’s global reach and its determination to capture signals everywhere it can.17*
The American public’s education about the NSA began in earnest in early 2003, when the Bush administration provided an unprecedented display of the NSA’s technical capabilities as part of its effort to build international support for its pending invasion of Iraq. On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell, with CIA director George Tenet in full view behind him, delivered his infamous presentation to the United Nations Security Council on the evidence the U.S. government had collected on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. In an unusual break from NSA secrecy, Powell was given permission to declassify and display three NSA intercepts of Iraqi military communications to buttress his argument that Saddam possessed WMD. One of the calls was between a brigadier general and a colonel of a unit that had been involved with WMD in the past, discussing the removal of their hardware. In another, a member of the elite Republican Guard was heard discussing what he called “forbidden ammo.” And in the third, a colonel instructed another officer not to use the term “nerve agents” in his instructions to other soldiers. The calls didn’t prove much of anything (General Hayden later said the intercepts were “arguably more ambiguous and open to interpretation” than Powell had suggested).18 Their lasting impact lay in the stunning display of technical prowess: out of millions of words uttered by Iraqi military officers, the NSA had the capability to pluck three conversations out of thin air that discussed, in great detail, military movements. Two years later, Americans would learn that the vast surveillance and eavesdropping powers that Powell displayed at the U.N. were being directed at them.*
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration ordered the NSA to launch a three-pronged offensive to detect and intercept phone calls, e-mails, fax messages, and Internet communications that might be related to terrorism. At first glance, the differences between these three programs might be difficult to grasp. In fact, each one is a separate piece of a broader NSA surveillance system put in place after 9/11, and each one required a separate relationship between the NSA and sectors of the Intelligence-Industrial Complex. In the first program, under what became known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the NSA was given the authority to monitor domestic telephone calls and Internet messages in which a suspected terrorist was at one end of the conversation without seeking warrants from the secret FISA court established by Congress in 1978. That program, which involved the close cooperation of the telecommunications industry, lasted until January 2007, when it was brought under the supervision of the FISA system. But during the intervening years, two other projects came to light. One required telecommunications carriers and Internet service providers to grant the NSA direct access to high-speed communications switches that connected U.S. telephone and Internet traffic to the global communications system, thus giving the NSA the ability to monitor domestic communications as well as foreign-to-foreign phone calls routed through the United States.19 And in a third program, the NSA sought and received permission from the leading telephone service providers, including AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, to sift through their massive records of telephone calls, e-mails, and Internet messages for possible clues on potential terrorists.
There was also a fourth program: a vast data mining effort on the part of the NSA to sift through the massive amounts of data gathered in the three wiretapping programs. This effort would have involved the NSA’s outsourced IT vendors, and has largely been overlooked by the media and Congress. The first hints of such a program first appeared in State of War, James Risen’s book about U.S. intelligence and the NSA spying program. According to the New York Times reporter, President Bush wrote his October 2001 executive orders so the NSA would have “the freedom to employ extremely powerful computerized search programs”—originally designed to scan foreign communications under the Echelon program uncovered in Europe during the 1990s—in order to “scrutinize large volumes of American communications.” The names of the companies involved in the data mining operation were a tightly held secret, and “only a very few top executives in each corporation” were aware of the relationships or even knew about the “willingness of the corporations to cooperate on intelligence matters.”20
During the summer of 2007, the Times elaborated further. Quoting “current and former officials” who had been briefed on the NSA program, it reported that a 2004 confrontation between the Justice Department and the White House over the NSA program “involved computer searches through massive electronic databases.” The Times could not determine precisely why searching the databases raised “such a furious legal debate” and led several top Justice officials to threaten to resign. “But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues,” the paper concluded.21 If it had chosen to dig further, however, the Times could have identified some of the players. The number of companies that could be involved is not large, and can be traced to the NSA’s outsourcing of its communications and signals intelligence operations over the past eight years. Once again, we must return to the last years of the Clinton administration.
By the 1990s, the NSA’s historical dominance in computers and code breaking had begun to fade. Commercial developments in computing power, cryptology, and high-speed telecommunications surpassed the agency’s ability to keep up with the millions of calls it was monitoring every day. And in the course of a few years, the world switched from using telephone lines and calls beamed by radar to using fiber-optic lines, cell phones, and wireless technology. The NSA’s eavesdropping skills, in contrast, were in the old telephony infrastructure and electronic signals; the fiber-optic lines increasingly used around the world were almost impossible to monitor from above the ground.
“Wiretapping was physically relatively easy” prior to the 1990s, says Peter Swire, the Ohio State law professor. “If I touch my copper wires to your copper wire, I can listen in. That’s the old-fashioned wiretap.” But that doesn’t work with fiber optics. “If I touch my glass to your piece of glass, it doesn’t do anything to conduct.”22 As fiber optics increasingly became the system of choice for communications, intelligence analysts began to say the NSA was “going deaf.” As it faced up to the technological challenge, the NSA was also reeling from budget cuts that decreased its workforce by 30 percent over the 1990s. These cuts were part of the peace dividend that Congress had insisted on after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, but their consequences were lethal, Hayden told Congress in 2002. The danger, he said, “was not that SIGINT would go away, but that it would cease to be an industrial strength source of American intelligence.”23
The NSA’s wake-up call came just a few weeks into the new century. On the morning of January 24, 2000, the agency’s internal computer systems suffered a catastrophic crash, blacking out the huge agency for three and a half days. “This was not your garden-variety computer crash,” former senator Bob Graham, who once chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, recalled. “It was a full shutdown of the largest computer system in the world. For the next three days, as hundreds of engineers and technicians worked around the clock to restart the complex network, trillions of bytes of data were being collected daily but not analyzed.”24 The NSA would later report that the outage “greatly reduced the signals intelligence information available to national decision makers and military commanders” and cut the President’s Daily Brief “to a small portion of its typical size.”25 Graham blamed the outage on the NSA’s failure “to keep pace with the rapid change in computer and telecommunications technology, the greater complexity of collecting that information, and the expanded target.” Simply put, he said, “the NSA’s system was outdated. Given the volume of information it was collecting, it was as if the system were trying to drink from a fire hose; it couldn’t keep up.”26 The blackout was the final straw for an agency that now
faced becoming a sideshow in a telecommunications and computer revolution that was sweeping through the world. But there was worse to come: just prior to 9/11, NSA eavesdroppers picked up a conversation by Al Qaeda operatives referring to the attack; but its analysts had failed to translate it in time. The NSA director, Mike Hayden, didn’t want that ever to happen again.
The challenges facing the NSA were summarized in a secret report presented to President Bush when he came into office. A declassified copy of the report was obtained in 2005 by the National Security Archive at George Washington University and published on its Web site.27 Throughout the Cold War, the NSA report said, the agency had “operated in a mostly analog world of point-to-point communications carried along discrete, dedicated voice channels. These communications were rarely encrypted, and those that were used mostly indigenous encryption that did not change frequently. Before the arrival of fiber optic technology, most of these communications were in the air and could be accessed using conventional means; the volume was growing but at a rate that could be processed and exploited.” But that had all changed, presenting the NSA with an enormous challenge.
Now, communications are mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia. They are dynamically routed, globally networked and pass over traditional communications means such as microwave or satellite less and less. Today, there are fiber optic and high-speed wire-line networks and most importantly, an emerging wireless environment that included cellular phones, Personal Digital Assistants and computers. Encryption is commercially available, growing in sophistication, and packaged in off-the-shelf computer software. The volumes and routing of data make finding and processing nuggets of intelligence information more difficult. To perform both its offensive and defensive missions, NSA must “live on the network.”