National Security Agency Totally Explained

Everything about National Security Agency totally explained

The National Security Agency (NSA) is a military intelligence agency governed by the United States Department of Defense. Its primary function is to collect and analyze all foreign signals intelligence of interest to the security of the United States. In addition, the NSA conducts advanced research in the area of information assurance.

Organization

The National Security Agency is divided into two major missions: the Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID), responsible for the production of foreign signals intelligence information, and the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD), responsible for the protection of U.S. information systems.

Role

The NSA's domestic eavesdropping mission includes radio broadcasting, both from various organizations and individuals, the Internet, telephone calls, and other intercepted forms of communication. Its secure communications mission includes military, diplomatic, and all other sensitive, confidential or secret government communications. Despite having been described as the world's largest single employer of mathematicians, and the owner of the single largest group of supercomputers, it has tried to keep a low profile. For many years its existence wasn't even acknowledged by the U.S. government.
   Because of its listening task, the NSA/CSS has been heavily involved in cryptanalytic research, continuing the work of predecessor agencies which had been responsible for breaking many World War II codes and ciphers (see, for instance, Purple code, Venona, and JN-25).
   In 2004, the NSA Central Security Service and the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agreed to expand the NSA Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education Program.
   As part of National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54), signed on January 8, 2008 by President Bush, the NSA became the lead agency to monitor and protect all of the federal government's computer networks from cyber-terrorism.

Facilities

Headquarters for the National Security Agency are at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, approximately ten miles (16 km) northeast of Washington, D.C. NSA has its own exit

off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway labeled "NSA Employees Only". The scale of the operations at the NSA is hard to determine from unclassified data; photos have shown there to be 18,000 parking spaces at the site. In 2006, the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA was at risk of electrical overload because of insufficient internal electrical infrastructure at Fort Meade to support the amount of equipment being installed. This problem was apparently recognized in the 1990s but not made a priority, and "now the agency's ability to keep its operations going is threatened". Its secure government communications work has involved NSA in numerous technology areas, including the design of specialized communications hardware and software, production of dedicated semiconductors (at the Ft. Meade chip fabrication plant), and advanced cryptography research. The agency contracts with the private sector in the fields of research and equipment.
In addition to its Ft. Meade headquarters, the NSA has other facilities such as the Texas Cryptology Center in San Antonio, Texas.

History

The origins of the National Security Agency can be traced to the May 20, 1949 creation of the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA). This organization was originally established within the U.S. Department of Defense under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The AFSA was to be responsible for directing the communications and electronic intelligence activities of the US military intelligence units—the Army Security Agency, the Naval Security Group, and the Air Force Security Service; however, the agency had little power and lacked a centralized coordination mechanism. The creation of the NSA resulted from a December 10, 1951, memo sent by CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith to James S. Lay, Executive Secretary of the National Security Council. The memo observed that "control over, and coordination of, the collection and processing of Communications Intelligence had proved ineffective" and recommended a survey of communications intelligence activities. The proposal was approved on December 13, 1951, and the study authorized on December 28, 1951. The report was completed by June 13, 1952. Generally known as the "Brownell Committee Report," after committee chairman Herbert Brownell, it surveyed the history of U.S. communications intelligence activities and suggested the need for a much greater degree of coordination and direction at the national level. As the change in the security agency's name indicated, the role of the NSA was extended beyond the armed forces.
The creation of the NSA was authorized in a letter written by President Harry S. Truman in June of 1952. The agency was formally established through a revision of National Security Council Intelligence Directive (NSCID) 9 on October 24, 1952, and officially came into existence on November 4, 1952. President Truman's letter was itself classified and remained unknown to the public for more than a generation.

Insignia

The heraldic insignia of NSA consists of a bald eagle facing its right, grasping a key in its talons, representing NSA's clutch on security as well as the mission to protect and gain access to secrets. The eagle is set on a background of blue and its breast features a blue shield supported by thirteen bands of red and white. The surrounding white circular border features "National Security Agency" around the top and "United States of America" underneath, with two five-pointed silver stars between the two phrases. The current NSA insignia has been in use since 1965, when then-Director, LTG Marshall S. Carter (USA) ordered the creation of a device to represent the Agency.

Impact on non-governmental cryptography

NSA has been involved in debates about public policy, both as a behind-the-scenes adviser to other departments, and directly during and after Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman's directorship. NSA was a major player in the debates of the 1990s regarding the export of cryptography. Restrictions on export were reduced but not eliminated in 1996.

Data Encryption Standard (DES)

The NSA was embroiled in some controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher algorithm used by the US government and banking community. During the development of DES by IBM in the 1970s, the NSA recommended changes to some details of the design. There was suspicion that these changes had weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable the agency to eavesdrop if required, including speculation that a critical component—the so-called S-boxes—had been altered to insert a "backdoor" and that the reduction in key length might have made it feasible for NSA to discover DES keys using massive computing power. It has since been observed that the S-boxes in DES are particularly resilient against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which wasn't publicly discovered until the late 1980s, but which was known to the IBM DES team. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed NSA's involvement, and concluded that while the agency had provided some assistance, it hadn't tampered with the design.

Clipper chip

Because of concerns that widespread use of strong cryptography would hamper government use of wiretaps, the NSA proposed the concept of key escrow in 1993 and introduced the Clipper chip that would offer stronger protection than DES but would allow access to encrypted data by authorized law enforcement officials. The proposal was strongly opposed and key escrow requirements ultimately went nowhere. However, NSA's Fortezza hardware-based encryption cards, created for the Clipper project, are still used within government, and the NSA ultimately published the design of the SKIPJACK cipher (but not the key exchange protocol) used on the cards.

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

Possibly because of previous controversy, the involvement of NSA in the selection of a successor to DES, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), was initially limited to hardware performance testing (see AES competition). NSA has subsequently certified AES for protection of classified information (for at most two levels, for example SECRET information in an unclassified environment) when used in NSA-approved systems. The widely-used SHA hash functions were designed by NSA.

Dual EC DRBG random number generator

The NSA promoted the inclusion of a random number generator called Dual EC DRBG in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's 2007 guidelines that has again attracted speculation about the presence of a backdoor which would allow NSA access to data encrypted by systems using that random number generator.

Academic research

The NSA has invested many millions of dollars in academic research under grant code prefix MDA904, resulting in over 3,000 papers (as of 2007-10-11). NSA funding sources are often declared in the papers, but some researchers try to conceal or otherwise play down the source
The NSA/CSS has, at times, attempted to restrict the publication of academic research into cryptography; for example, the Khufu and Khafre block ciphers were voluntarily withheld in response to an NSA request to do so.

Patents

The NSA has the ability to file for a patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office under gag order. Unlike normal patents, these are not revealed to the public and don't expire. However, if the Patent Office receives an application for an identical patent from a third party, that'll reveal the NSA's patent and officially grant it to the NSA for the full term on that date.
One of the NSA's published patents describes a method of geographically locating an individual computer site in an Internet-like network, based on the latency of multiple network connections.

NSA programs

ECHELON

NSA/CSS, in combination with the equivalent agencies in the United Kingdom (Government Communications Headquarters), Canada (Communications Security Establishment), Australia (Defence Signals Directorate), and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Bureau), otherwise known as the UKUSA group, is widely reported to be in command of the operation of the so-called ECHELON system. Its capabilities are suspected to include the ability to monitor a large proportion of the world's transmitted civilian telephone, fax and data traffic, according to a December 16, 2005 article in the New York Times.
   Technically, almost all modern telephone, internet, fax and satellite communications are exploitable due to recent advances in technology and the 'open air' nature of much of the radio communications around the world. The NSA's presumed collection operations have generated much criticism, possibly stemming from the assumption that the NSA/CSS represents an infringement of Americans' privacy. However, the NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about "...US persons, entities, corporations or organizations..." without explicit written legal permission from the Attorney General of the United States The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that intelligence agencies can't conduct surveillance against American citizens. There are a few extreme circumstances where collecting on a U.S. entity is allowed without a USSID 18 waiver, such as with civilian distress signals, or sudden emergencies such as the September 11, 2001 attacks; however, the USA PATRIOT Act has significantly changed privacy legality.
   There have been alleged violations of USSID 18 that occurred in violation of the NSA's strict charter prohibiting such acts. In addition, ECHELON is considered with indignation by citizens of countries outside the UKUSA alliance, with numerous allegations that the United States government uses it for motives other than its national security, including political and industrial espionage. Examples include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie. An article in the Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that aerospace company Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994 after the NSA reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract. The chartered purpose of the NSA/CSS is solely to acquire significant foreign intelligence information pertaining to National Security or ongoing military intelligence operations.
   In his book Firewall, Andy McNab speculates that the UKUSA agreement is designed to enable the NSA, GCHQ, and other equivalent organizations to gather intelligence on each other's citizens. For example, the NSA can't legally conduct surveillance on American citizens, but GCHQ might do it for them.

Domestic activity

The NSA's mission, as set forth in Executive Order 12333, is to collect information that constitutes "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence" while not "acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons". The NSA has declared that it relies on the FBI to collect information on foreign intelligence activities within the borders of the USA, while confining its own activities within the USA to the embassies and missions of foreign nations.
The NSA's domestic surveillance activities are limited by the requirements imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; however, these protections don't apply to non-U.S. persons located outside of U.S. borders, so the NSA's foreign surveillance efforts are subject to far fewer limitations under U.S. law. The specific requirements for domestic surveillance operations are contained in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which doesn't extend protection to non-U.S. citizens located outside of U.S. territory.

Warrantless wiretaps under George W. Bush

On December 16, 2005, the New York Times reported that, under White House pressure and with an executive order from President George W. Bush, the National Security Agency, in an attempt to thwart terrorism, had been tapping the telephones of individuals in the U.S. calling persons outside the country, without obtaining warrants from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court created for that purpose under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Proponents of the surveillance program claim that the President has executive authority to order such action, arguing that laws such as FISA are overriden by the President's Constitutional powers. In addition, some argued that FISA was implicitly overridden by a subsequent statute, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, although the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld deprecates this view. In the August 2006 case ACLU v. NSA, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor concluded that the NSA's warantless surveillance program was both illegal and unconstitutional. On July 6, 2007 the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Taylor's ruling, reversing her findings.

AT&T Internet monitoring

In May 2006, Mark Klein, a former AT&T employee, alleged that his company had cooperated with the NSA in installing hardware to monitor network communications including traffic between American citizens.

Transaction data mining

The NSA is reported to use its computing capability to analyze "transactional" data that it regularly acquires from other government agencies, which gather it under their own jurisdictional authorities. As part of this effort, the NSA now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions and travel and telephone records, according to current and former intelligence officials interviewed by the WSJ.

In fiction

Since the existence of the NSA has become more widely known in the last few decades, and particularly since the 1990s, the agency has regularly been portrayed in spy fiction. Many such portrayals grossly exaggerate the organization's involvement in the more sensational activities of intelligence agencies. An indication of the agency's increased fame is its central role in the films Sneakers and Enemy of the State, and its mention in the James Bond movie Die Another Day. The NSA has been featured in many other films, television shows, books, roleplaying games and video games.

Staff

Directors

Nov. 1952 Nov. 1956 Lt. Gen. Ralph J. Canine, USA
Nov. 1956 Nov. 1960 Lt. Gen. John A. Samford, USAF
Nov. 1960 Jan. 1962 V. Adm. Laurence H. Frost, USN
Jan. 1962 June 1965 Lt. Gen. Gordon A. Blake, USAF
June 1965 Aug. 1969 Lt. Gen. Marshall S. Carter, USA
Aug. 1969 Aug. 1972 V. Adm. Noel A. M. Gaylor, USN
Aug. 1972 Aug. 1973 Lt. Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, USAF
Aug. 1973 July 1977 Lt. Gen. Lew Allen, Jr., USAF
July 1977 Apr. 1981 V. Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, USN
Apr. 1981 May 1985 Lt. Gen. Lincoln D. Faurer, USAF
May 1985 Aug. 1988 Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, USA
Aug. 1988 May 1992 V. Adm. William O. Studeman, USN
May 1992 Feb. 1996 V. Adm. John M. McConnell, USN
Feb. 1996 Mar. 1999 Lt. Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, USAF
Mar. 1999 Apr. 2005 Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, USAF
Apr. 2005 present Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, USA

Deputy Directors

Dec. 1952 Nov. 1953 R. Adm. Joseph Wenger, USN

Nov. 1953 June 1956 Brig. Gen. John Ackerman, USAF

Jun. 1956 Aug. 1956 Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, USAF

Aug. 1956 Sep. 1957 Mr. Joseph H. Ream

Oct. 1957 Jul. 1958 Dr. H. T. Engstrom

Aug. 1958 Apr. 1974 Dr. Louis W. Tordella, USN

Apr. 1974 May 1978 Mr. Benson K. Buffham

May 1978 Apr. 1980 Mr. Robert E. Drake

Apr. 1980 Jul. 1982 Ms. Ann Z. Caracristi

Jul. 1982 Jun. 1985 Mr. Robert E. Rich

Jun. 1985 Mar. 1988 Mr. Charles R. Lord

Mar. 1988 Jul. 1990 Mr. Gerald R. Young

Jul. 1990 Feb. 1994 Mr. Robert L. Prestel

Feb. 1994 Oct. 1997 Mr. William P. Crowell

Oct. 1997 June 2000 Ms. Barbara A. McNamara

Jun. 2000 Aug. 2006 Mr. William B. Black, Jr.

Aug. 2006 present Mr. John C. (Chris) Inglis, Brig. Gen. (retired), USAF & USANG

Notable cryptanalysts

Lambros D. Callimahos

Herbert Yardley

NSA encryption systems

NSA is responsible for the encryption-related components in these systems:

EKMS Electronic Key Management System

FNBDT Future Narrow Band Digital Terminal

Fortezza encryption based on portable crypto token in PC Card format

KL-7 ADONIS off-line rotor encryption machine (post-WW II to 1980s)

KW-26 ROMULUS electronic in-line teletype encryptor (1960s–1980s)

KW-37 JASON fleet broadcast encryptor (1960s–1990s)

KY-57 VINSON tactical radio voice encryptor

KG-84 Dedicated Data Encryption/Decryption

SINCGARS tactical radio with cryptographically controlled frequency hopping

STE secure telephone equipment

STU-III secure telephone unit, currently being phased out by the STE

TACLANE product line by General Dynamics

Some past NSA SIGINT activities

VENONA project

Gulf of Tonkin Incident

USS Liberty incident

USS Pueblo (AGER-2)

Operation Ivy Bells

KAL 007 shootdown incident. Here are the combined U.S. Electronic Intercept and Russian Federation supplied transcripts of the shootdown in progress - (External Link

)Further Information

Get more info on 'National Security Agency'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://national_security_agency.totallyexplained.com">National Security Agency Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.