[iwar] news

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-07-29 08:15:28
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 08:15:28 -0700 (PDT)
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By Vernon Loeb

Sunday, July 29, 2001; Page W08

The call came after dinner on a Monday night, as the general was watching
the TV news at home. There was a computer problem back at the agency. A
software failure had knocked out the network.

"Give me a sense," the general commanded the duty officer over the secure
phone line. "What are we talking about?"

"The whole system is down," the duty officer said. A result of overloading.
Plus, the network had become so tangled that no one really seemed to know
how it worked. There was no wiring diagram anyone could consult.

It was January 24, 2000. Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden was still new on the job
-- just finishing his 10th month as director of the National Security Agency
-- but he did not need a duty officer to explain the implications of his
computer problem. The agency's constellation of spy satellites and its giant
listening stations on five continents were still vacuuming communications
out of the ether. Their vast electronic "take" -- intercepted telephone
calls, e-mails, faxes and radio signals -- still poured into memory buffers
capable of storing 5 trillion pages of data at agency headquarters at Fort
Meade. But once in house, the data froze. Nobody could access it, nobody
could analyze it.

The NSA -- the largest and most powerful spy agency in the world -- was
brain-dead.

Hayden called George J. Tenet on a secure phone and broke the news to the
director of central intelligence. The nation's two top spymasters knew there
was nothing they could do but get out of the way and let the technicians try
to figure out what was wrong. The keepers of the nation's secrets now had
another one to keep -- a secret Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or some
other enemy of the state could have surely used to great advantage.

The next morning, the only consolation Hayden had was the snow: A blizzard
had blasted Washington and shut down the federal government, giving his
gathering army of computer engineers and techies some time -- without the
workforce around -- to bring the agency out of its coma. Hayden's despair
deepened as two full days passed without progress. The mathematicians and
linguists reported back for duty Thursday morning, only to find a
handwritten message taped to doors and computer terminals: "Our network is
experiencing intermittent difficulties. Consult your supervisor before you
log on."

The crash had now become a security crisis. By noon, at a hastily called
"town meeting," Hayden walked onto the stage of the agency's Friedman
Auditorium and told thousands of employees -- in person and on
closed-circuit television -- what had happened.

"We are the keeper of the nation's secrets," he said at the end of his grim
presentation. "If word of this gets out, we significantly increase the
likelihood that Americans will get hurt. Those who would intend our nation
and our citizens harm will be emboldened. So this is not the back half of a
sentence tonight that begins, 'Honey, you won't believe what happened to me
at work.' This is secret. It does not leave the building."

Could all 30,000 employees live by the code of secrecy they'd grown up with?

To Hayden, a career intelligence officer who had served in the first Bush
White House and had run the Air Force's cyberwar center, the computer crash
seemed the perfect metaphor for an agency desperately in need of new
technology. But the reality, he would quickly see, was actually worse.
Antiquated computers were the least of the NSA's problems.

By virtue of its magnitude and complexity, the NSA invites superlatives and
outsize comparisons. Its collections systems scoop up enough data every
three hours to fill the Library of Congress. It employs the world's largest
collection of linguists and mathematicians and owns the world's largest
array of supercomputers. To power the supercomputers, it uses as much
electricity as the city of Annapolis. To cool them, it maintains 8,000 tons
of chilled water capacity. One of its most powerful computers generates so
much heat it operates while immersed in a nonconducting liquid called
Flourinert.

But beyond the gee-whiz factor lies an agency in need of reinvention.

Heir to America's World War II code-breaking heroics, the agency was created
in secret by President Harry Truman in 1952. Signals intelligence -- SIGINT,
in spy parlance -- has long been considered even more valuable than human
intelligence or satellite imagery, because the quantity and quality of the
potential take is so much greater. The NSA was intended to be the world's
premier SIGINT agency, encoding American secret communications while
stealing and decoding other nations'. Soon after its founding, the agency
started growing into a juggernaut that would put listening posts around the
globe, spy ships and submarines out to sea, and reconnaissance planes and
satellites in the heavens.

The NSA rose to dominance in what were, in telecommunications terms, simpler
times. Radio signals and microwaves were ripe for the taking as they bounced
off the ionosphere or traveled straight out into space; to intercept them,
one simply needed to get in their path. And the NSA did this better than
anyone else, using everything from portable receivers that picked up
vibrations off windowpanes to geosynchronous satellites 22,000 miles above
Earth.

It was the NSA that first reported the presence of Soviet offensive missiles
in Cuba in 1962. It was the NSA that first warned of the Tet offensive --
five days before the attacks commenced across South Vietnam in January 1968.
All told, the NSA broke the codes of 40 nations during the Cold War and,
through an operation code-named Gamma Guppy, intercepted personal
conversations of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev. In 1986, President Ronald
Reagan went so far as to bomb Col. Moammar Gaddafi's Tripoli headquarters
after NSA intercepts revealed Libya's role in a terrorist attack on a Berlin
discotheque that had killed two U.S. servicemen and a Turkish woman.

Making and breaking codes requires absolute secrecy, and the NSA took
secrecy to extremes. Most Americans had never even heard of the agency for
decades after it was established. In 1975, a Senate select committee headed
by Sen. Frank Church revealed that the NSA had far exceeded the foreign
intelligence mission envisioned by Truman and had been spying domestically
on the likes of Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Benjamin Spock and the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr.

The revelations led to laws and regulations that strictly prohibit the NSA
from spying on U.S. soil -- laws and regulations, agency officials say, they
now strictly follow. But the agency's cult of secrecy proved far more
resilient. Even after the Church committee's revelations, it was a standing
joke at Fort Meade that NSA stood for No Such Agency or Never Say Anything.
In 1982, when author James Bamford was writing his groundbreaking first book
about the agency, The Puzzle Palace, the Reagan administration threatened to
prosecute him for espionage if he did not return sensitive documents he had
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The administration
ultimately backed down, but its treatment of Bamford was a sign of how
secretive and arrogant the NSA had become. (By contrast, Hayden cooperated
with Bamford on his second book about the NSA, Body of Secrets, which was
published in May.)

The agency's high opinion of itself was backed up by its success throughout
the Cold War, success that rested on three pillars: massive budgets,
superior technology and the luxury of having a single main adversary -- the
Soviet Union -- that enjoyed neither of those first two advantages.

Now, all those pillars have crumbled.

The NSA is still one of the largest employers in the state of Maryland, but
it lost 30 percent of its budget and an equivalent slice of its workforce
during the 1990s. And instead of one backward adversary, the agency found
itself trying to deploy against elusive terrorist groups, drug cartels and
rogue states, in addition to a full slate of traditional targets ranging
from Russia to China to India to Pakistan. In 1980, the NSA focused about 60
percent of its budget on the Soviet Union. By 1993, less than 15 percent was
fixed on Russia.

But if the end of the Cold War was hard on the NSA, the onset of the digital
age was harder. More and more communications were moving through hard-to-tap
fiber-optic cable. More and more were encoded with powerful new encryption
software that was proving virtually impossible to break. By the late 1990s,
NSA officials had given up a futile effort to limit the spread of encryption
software, but they were left fearful of how their agency's capabilities
could wither if, say, Microsoft started building powerful encryption
algorithms into its operating systems.

More immediately, the NSA had to confront the exploding volume of global
communications. In the 1950s, there were 5,000 computers in the world and
not a single fax machine or cell phone. Today, there are more than 100
million hosts on the Internet serving hundreds of millions of networked
computers, not to mention 650 million cell phones in use worldwide. And with
broadband fiber-

optic cable being laid around the world at the rate of hundreds of miles an
hour (virtually the speed of sound), the speed for moving digital data down
these slender pipes more than doubles annually -- faster even than computing
power, which doubles every year and a half.

With more and more digital data moving across the Internet and bouncing off
communications satellites, SIGINT has become more important than ever. Yet
the interceptible data stream has threatened to drown the NSA's analysts in
a roiling sea of 1s and 0s.

In this new context, private industry suddenly controls the technology that
the NSA needs to keep pace. But the NSA has been isolated from the dynamism
of the market by its own cult of secrecy. The agency has fallen farther and
farther behind, unable to sort through a torrent of information streaming
back into Fort Meade's computers and, to some extent, incapable of replacing
its Cold War troops trained in radio intercepts and Russian with Internet
engineers and Arabic speakers.

In 1999, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence declared that
the NSA was "in serious trouble," desperately short of capital and
leadership. Civil libertarians, Internet privacy activists and encryption
entrepreneurs -- not to mention the European Parliament and thousands,
perhaps millions, of ordinary Europeans -- question the continuing need for
such an agency, describing the NSA as an "extreme threat to the privacy of
people all over the world," in the words of an American Civil Liberties
Union Web site.

But the U.S. government considers SIGINT so essential that one senior
intelligence official recently called the NSA's possible demise the greatest
single threat to U.S. national security. So, three years ago, when the House
and Senate intelligence committees began sounding the alarm, the director of
central intelligence began an all-out search for somebody to fill the NSA's
leadership void. George Tenet turned to a man who lacked the innate
spookiness normally associated with this spookiest of agencies. A small man
with a crew cut and a bald pate. A man with a scholarly interest in history.
A man who would show no fear of either the public or the agency he would
have to overhaul.

--
Fred Cohen at Sandia National Laboratories at tel:925-294-2087 fax:925-294-1225
  Fred Cohen & Associates: http://all.net - fc@all.net - tel/fax:925-454-0171
      Fred Cohen - Practitioner in Residence - The University of New Haven
   This communication is confidential to the parties it is intended to serve.
	PGP keys: https://all.net/pgpkeys.html - Have a great day!!!

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