Spy Girl 2: The National Security Agency
Lola Montez
I am an old hand in the intelligence community. I am one of the few women who worked out in the field who was not a dangle. I have recently left the agencies and hope to shed some light on recent issues as well as explain what little I know about the various agencies working in intelligence. This may range from commentary on popular movies to open source information on what I know about current news events. I hope you will join me from time to time to see what is new. The photo is of Mata Hari in 1917. She was an "asset" or "trusted source," but her handlers did not approve of her methods. She was no lady, but she saved many lives and died for her country.
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The number of kudos the latest Bourne movie receives will not make it more than a badly written movie that canâ019t make up its mind whether the bad guys are from the Central Intelligence Agency (the standard evil presence in American movies) or the National Security Agency (NSA). Despite power grabs by one particular agency each agency is supposed to have different functions. The function of the NSA is to monitor signals. Signal intelligence is abbreviated SIGINT.
 
SIGINT is any kind of information picked up from a technological device whether it is a radio, telephone, computer, satellites, robotic sensors, etc. Its official definition is anything intentionally transmitted by visual and other electromagnetic, nuclear, or acoustical methods for either communications or non-communications purposes. Got that? It means every keystroke of your computer is SIGINT. Technically, the NSA can only monitor signals outside the United States, but they convinced the Congress that things like phone calls which go to a satellite leave the US and are, thus, fair game. Weâ019ll discuss what that really means later. For right now, letâ019s deal with the agency itself.
 
Until relatively recently the existence of the NSA was classified and it was illegal for us to actually use the name. As a result there were all kinds of nicknames for it: SIGINT City, No Such Agency, Never Say Anything, and the organization down the street. There are still old NSA hands who are nervous about mentioning the name. The first book ever censored before publication in the US was The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford was about the NSA. His latest book, Body of Secrets, is probably the best book on the subject available. Never Say Anything is certainly appropriate for an agency whoâ019s motto is â01CWe donâ019t talk, we listen..,â01D Giving anything to any agency is like dropping it into a black hole, but the NSA is the master of silence.
 
The NSA has the largest known budget of any agency in the United States and everyone in the community assumes that their black (secret or unknown) budget is also by far and away the largest.
 
The NSA headquarters is primarily underground and is the only major agency located in Maryland rather than Virginia. These days there is a well guarded entrance off of the 295 not far from the BWI airport. As you drive by miles of forest enclosed by barbed wire you are passing our nationâ019s most secret facility. Surface streets inside the compound have wonderful names like Jolly Acres Road or Technology. Other surface streets are named for the people who are NSA heroes. There are also listening stations around the world and they use satellites and even airplanes to pick up transmissions.
 
The agency uses much of its budget to develop new technologies that helps them monitor the world. Much of what we are so grateful to use, such as GPS, were developed by the NSA. There are currently 344 patents publicly listed to the agency that include things like a method of biometric authentication, zero-clearance cutting systems, a method of monitoring and formatting computer network data, Methods for rapid detection and identification of bioagents in epidemiological and forensic investigations, and lots of others that sound fascinating. You can find the ones they own under their own name by doing a search at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html.
 
The once ultra secret agency now even has itâ019s own website at http://www.nsa.gov/. Their career pages will give you an excellent overview of what they really do. They want computer and math geeks, electrical engineers, cryptanalysts, intelligence analysts, and people who speak strange languages. They do NOT create brainwashed or cyborg killers like Bourne or any of the other things in recent movies. Probably the film closest to showing their capabilities is Enemy of the State the 1998 movie starring Will Smith. The only thing I will say about it is that they canâ019t redeploy the satellites that quickly and, in Washington DC where the action takes place, they donâ019t need to.
 
OK, so they can listen to every long distance telephone call you place, read every email as it passes through the major servers that distribute it around the world, read your license plate from outer space, and pick up every key stroke of the letter you are writing your Mum and will send hard copy; however, do they want to? Iâ019m sorry to tell Susan Serandon that even if she is politically active her phones are probably not tapped nor her email read â013 at least by the government. The chances are no one is interested in what you are saying or writing.
 
It is true that if an agency, especially the NSA, wants to target you they can do all of the above and more, but it takes a whole lot to become a target. Generally speaking the system works as follows. There is so much information traveling around the world that only a fraction could ever be monitored. To choose what is of most interest â01Csniffersâ01D gather copies of email, phone calls, etc. that contain words on a special list. Words and phrases currently on the list probably include suitcase nucs, denial of service, jihad (or more especially versions of it like j*had), and others that might signal a threat to our communications infrastructure or physical security. Even then there are so many messages it would require every man, woman, and child to read or listen to the ones gathered. So, agents pay attention to what seem to be the most likely and go down in some sort of hierarchy. I understand that, after about three months, if they dump what they havenâ019t gotten to yet and start all over. With so much on their plate the chances of your personal information being read and acted upon is slim indeed. Frankly, I think most people, even high profile people like the freakier members of moveon.org just hope they are important enough to gain such attention.
 
The NSA is not the only group to use SIGINT. For example, the FBI has said it has developed a program called Carnivore to access email and the military services have SIGINT specialists. Insofar as the military is concerned, the primary effort using SIGINT is called networkcentric warfare. No matter who is using these technologies there are two primary issues. The first concern is certainly for civil rights; however, functionally it is that we do not put people at the service of technology rather than technology at the service of people. We have already had some diplomatic disasters, and lost lives, because we trusted technological input over human observations and reports.