National Security Agency retools its image

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1000/101000nj.htm

October 10, 2000

By Neil Munro, National Journal

Here's a happy oxymoron made possible by the West's victory in the
Cold War: Family Day at the supersecret National Security Agency.

The great day came on Saturday, Sept. 23, after weeks of preparation,
during which the [number classified] NSA employees removed all
[classified] material from view, filed away documents pertaining to
its [classified] budget, and locked the door to its [classified]
computers in the [classified] control center at its home at Fort
Meade, Md.

About 16,000 family members, preceded by a gaggle of curious
journalists, then trooped through the agency's headquarters building,
restaurant, printing plant, antenna-testing chamber, security center
and other once-hidden facilities. It was a day to "celebrate who we
are," said Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, the NSA's director. It
was also a day to mark the agency's first internal reorganization
since the Cold War, and an occasion to reshape the agency's secretive
image, Hayden said in a brief chat with journalists in his corner
office.

Still, if it wants to succeed, the agency responsible for what is
known in the business as "signals intelligence"namely,
eavesdroppingcan't reveal its most important technical and spy
secrets, which are hidden inside safes and bolted buildings. Those
secrets include the technologies that search the world's airwaves for
whispered conversations and scrambled e-mails among foreign generals
and politicians, spies and soldiers, terrorists and bomb throwers and
bribers and smugglers. Just as important, the agency also hides from
visitors the secret design of the encryption technology used to
prevent foreign eavesdroppers from listening in on White House and
Pentagon conversations.

This secrecy is the NSA's blessing and curse. It is a blessing because
it has allowed the agency (and its predecessors) to gather
extraordinarily sensitive intelligencefor example, the combat
strengths of Nazi divisions down to the last rifle, and what the
Soviet premier was saying on the telephone in his limousine during
arms control talks. But the most obvious price for this secrecy is the
continuous suspicion, in many quarters, that the NSA could simply go
too far. This fear comes from major companies wary of government
regulation and privacy advocates and reporters who worry about civil
liberties.

Overseas, suspicions have begun to crystallize around the NSA's
"Echelon" system, which reportedly collects information beamed through
commercial communications satellites. European journalists, as well as
politicians in the British, German, and pan-European parliaments,
allege that Echelon steals business secrets on behalf of U.S.
companies, allowing them to snatch jobs away from European workers.
U.S. officials deny any such information-sharing, which is illegal
under U.S. law, and the NSA recently invited German legislators to
tour its eavesdropping center in Bad Aibling, Germany. But it is hard
to prove a negative, so the NSA may never be able to kill the Echelon
story.

There's another cost to secrecy: inflexibility in the face of rapid
political and technological change. During the many decades of the
Cold War, the NSA performed secretly, brilliantly, and nearly always
without domestic complaint. But it has had great difficulty
reorienting itself to the post-Cold War world, where commercial
companies sell NSA-defeating, data-scrambling gear to any and all
buyers, hire away promising employees, and lobby against NSA-backed
laws before a Congress increasingly sympathetic to business concerns.
The most obvious example of this congressional sympathy came in the
fight over data-scrambling encryption technology, when U.S. companies
persuaded the Congress and the White House to dismantle the Cold War
rules that barred the export of U.S. encryption products.

The agency now is putting more emphasis on hacking into other
countries' computersand on the corresponding defense of U.S. computers
from other countries' hackers. But this new emphasis irks many
legislators, companies and privacy advocates who are very reluctant to
give the NSA any major role in defending the nation's critical
computer-controlled networks-telephone, banking, oil distribution,
transportation, air traffic control, and so on.

Another symptom of the NSA's problems came in January, when the
agency's central computer systems crashed after what inside and
outside critics said was years of inadequate management and
investment. In response, the NSA asked for help from its stepchild,
the U.S. computer industry, which was nurtured on billions of dollars
in Cold War research grants, many of them funneled through the NSA.
Thus, the NSA hired an outside manager from SSDS Enterprise Network
Systems to reorganize and upgrade its computer networks, and brought
on a new finance manager from Legg Mason, a financial services
company, to run its accounting system. The agency has also stepped up
its efforts to hire and keep the very best technical experts,
countering the private sector's efforts to lure away talented
employees by offering higher salaries.

Hayden said that change at NSA is vital and that holding Family Day
was the right thing to do. "The American people need an image of this
agency so there is not a vacuum" that, he said, could be filled by bad
press and unrealistic movies.


*==============================================================*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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