National InSecurity

In the last week a whistle-blower exposed embarrassing revelations about the NSA. The National Security Agency is so secret that many federal workers that saw references to the "NSA" were told in no uncertain terms that as far as they were concerned that stood for "No Such Agency".

NSA's bailiwick is an obscure branch of spook-dom called signals intelligence which has been around since people used to splice into telegraph lines and listen to the message traffic. In World War I, various parties wanted to listen to trans-Atlantic traffic bound for interesting embassies. Later, in World War II US codebreakers turned the Pacific War when they discovered that an attack was imminent on Midway island. Armed with that information, the US Navy was able to surprise the Japanese fleet and sink four of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor six months before. In the Atlantic the capture of a German Enigma machine cracked the German Navy's codes which were used to coordinate U-boat activity. This gave the Allies a tremendous advantage and turned the Battle of the Atlantic.

It was scoops like the Midway signals intercepts and breaking the Enigma codes that showed the Allies the real war-winning advantages of signals intelligence. Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Nimitz all made special efforts to expand and improve this vital capability.

In the post war world, the US and the UK both knew the inestimable value of intelligence derived by signals analysis. Military and civilian leaders on both sides of the Atlantic knew and understood how vitally important these capabilities were. Even in the post-war build downs, they found the money necessary to retain and improve these capabilities. Once the the Cold War heated up, SIGINT became one of the very hottest areas of intelligence.

The Soviets began looking for nuclear secrets well before the end of WWII. Stalin wanted nuclear weapons and was willing and able to flood the US and the UK with spies. In 1946 the US and UK broke a code used by Soviet embassies and discovered how big the Soviet spying effort really was. The project was known as Verona and was a joint US-UK effort.

In 1947 the US and the UK signed a secret treaty where they cooperated in monitoring trans-Atlantic cables which became the first widespread surveillance of public communications media in peace time.

There was a lot to like about Signals Intelligence. You don't have double agents. You don't have to bribe anybody. You don't have all of the problems that you do when you are running human assets. SigInt never sleeps. It doesn't lie and it never takes a holiday. A great deal of money was spent and it became the West's most powerful and durable strategic intelligence asset.

The NSA's ancestor was the Armed Forces Security Agency. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) played a major role in the development of computer, networking technology and eventually even the Internet itself. Billions and BILLIONS of dollars were spent on R&D and the development of new capabilities and technologies. This even included the design, launch and operation of spy satellites with various capabilities like photographic recon, IR recon and the capture of faint radio signals.

In fact in 1959 the US launched the Vela series of satellites to detect nuclear detonations. These satellites discovered by chance Gamma Ray Bursters in the distant universe and inadvertently gave birth to orbital observatories and astronomy beyond the visible spectra.

In the mid eighties the US and UK brought a system online called Echelon which have the capabilities that we are now collectively freaking out over. It could electronically "listen" to signals and pick up on keywords and focus on individuals. These capabilities have only been improved and upgraded over the years.

These systems did not arrive on 9/11. They did not creep out of the Patriot Act. They have been growing and evolving in the shadows for decades funded by literally trillions of dollars in black budgets that your congressman has never heard of.

The reliance on SigInt has consequences. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, US intelligence agencies have become dependent on SigInt and allowed their human intelligence capabilities to atrophy. They called it "the Peace Dividend". There were huge defense and intelligence cuts and the US intelligence establishment had to chose. They hung onto their SigInt capabilities at the expense of allowing their human intelligence assets to dry up and blow away.

It was human assets that we blew off in Afghanistan that turned around and bit us on 9/11. It was SigInt that was completely blind to hand delivered messages and couriers that Osama bin Laden used to run his networks. It is those human assets that the US has had to develop to fight the war on terrorism.

We have purchased the capability with trillions of dollars and concentrated effort over many decades. There have been many, many technological spin-offs that have sparked our economy. Reacting hysterically is simple idiocy. This technological terror has been here for decades. Those of us in the tech business quit talking about it years ago because people labeled us conspiracy nuts and invited us to don tin hats.

Our task is to find a middle way to live with the beast but refuse to allow it to devour us. That requires oversight and that's just the sort of thing that spooks hate.