National Security Agency
The National Security Agency is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence. The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for global intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence. The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems. The NSA relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine. The NSA has roughly 32,000 employees.
Originating as a unit to decipher coded communications in World War II, it was officially formed as the NSA by President Harry S. Truman in 1952. Between then and the end of the Cold War, it became the largest of the U.S. intelligence organizations in terms of personnel and budget. Still, information available as of 2013 indicates that the Central Intelligence Agency pulled ahead in this regard, with a budget of $14.7 billion. The NSA currently conducts worldwide mass data collection and has been known to physically bug electronic systems as one method to this end. The NSA is also alleged to have been behind such attack software as Stuxnet, which severely damaged Iran's nuclear program. The NSA, alongside the CIA, maintains a physical presence in many countries across the globe; the CIA/NSA joint Special Collection Service inserts eavesdropping devices in high-value targets. SCS collection tactics allegedly encompass "close surveillance, burglary, wiretapping, breaking".
Unlike the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, both of which specialize primarily in foreign human espionage, the NSA does not publicly conduct human intelligence gathering. The NSA is entrusted with assisting with and coordinating SIGINT elements for other government organizations—which Executive Order prevents from engaging in such activities on their own. As part of these responsibilities, the agency has a co-located organization called the Central Security Service, which facilitates cooperation between the NSA and other U.S. defense cryptanalysis components. To further ensure streamlined communication between the signals intelligence community divisions, the NSA director simultaneously serves as the Commander of the United States Cyber Command and as Chief of the Central Security Service.
The NSA's actions have been a matter of political controversy on several occasions, including its role in providing intelligence during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which contributed to the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Declassified documents later revealed that the NSA misinterpreted or overstated signals intelligence, leading to reports of a second North Vietnamese attack that likely never occurred. The agency has also received scrutiny for [|spying on anti–Vietnam War leaders] and the agency's participation in economic espionage. In 2013, the NSA had many of its secret surveillance programs revealed to the public by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor. According to the leaked documents, the NSA intercepts and stores the communications of over a billion people worldwide, including United States citizens. The documents also revealed that the NSA tracks hundreds of millions of people's movements using cell phone metadata. Internationally, research has pointed to the NSA's ability to surveil the domestic Internet traffic of foreign countries through "boomerang routing".
History
Formation
The origins of the National Security Agency can be traced back to April 28, 1917, three weeks after the U.S. Congress declared war on Germany in World War I. A code and cipher decryption unit was established as the Cable and Telegraph Section, which was also known as the Cipher Bureau. It was headquartered in Washington, D.C., and was part of the war effort under the executive branch without direct congressional authorization. During the war, it was relocated in the army's organizational chart several times. On July 5, 1917, Herbert O. Yardley was assigned to head the unit. At that point, the unit consisted of Yardley and two civilian clerks. It absorbed the Navy's cryptanalysis functions in July 1918. World War I ended on November 11, 1918, and the army cryptographic section of Military Intelligence moved to New York City on May 20, 1919, where it continued intelligence activities as the Code Compilation Company under the direction of Yardley.The Black Chamber
After the disbandment of the U.S. Army cryptographic section of military intelligence known as MI-8, the U.S. government created the Cipher Bureau, also known as Black Chamber, in 1919. The Black Chamber was the United States' first peacetime cryptanalytic organization. Jointly funded by the Army and the State Department, the Cipher Bureau was disguised as a New York City commercial code company; it produced and sold such codes for business use. Its true mission, however, was to break the communications of other nations. At the Washington Naval Conference, it aided American negotiators by providing them with the decrypted traffic of many of the conference delegations, including the Japanese. The Black Chamber successfully persuaded Western Union, the largest U.S. telegram company at the time, as well as several other communications companies, to illegally give the Black Chamber access to cable traffic of foreign embassies and consulates. Soon, these companies publicly discontinued their collaboration. Despite the Chamber's initial successes, it was shut down in 1929 by U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, who defended his decision by stating, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."World War II and its aftermath
During World War II, the Signal Intelligence Service was created to intercept and decipher the communications of the Axis powers. When the war ended, the SIS was reorganized as the Army Security Agency, and it was placed under the leadership of the Director of Military Intelligence.On May 20, 1949, all cryptologic activities were centralized under a national organization called the Armed Forces Security Agency. This organization was originally established within the U.S. Department of Defense under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The AFSA was tasked with directing the Department of Defense communications and electronic intelligence activities, except those of U.S. military intelligence units. However, the AFSA was unable to centralize communications intelligence and failed to coordinate with civilian agencies that shared its interests, such as the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In December 1951, President Harry S. Truman ordered a panel to investigate how AFSA had failed to achieve its goals. The results of the investigation led to improvements and its redesignation as the National Security Agency.
The National Security Council issued a memorandum of October 24, 1952, that revised National Security Council Intelligence Directive 9. On the same day, Truman issued a second memorandum that called for the establishment of the NSA. The actual establishment of the NSA was done by a November 4 memo by Robert A. Lovett, the Secretary of Defense, changing the name of the AFSA to the NSA, and making the new agency responsible for all communications intelligence. Since President Truman's memo was a classified document, the existence of the NSA was not known to the public at that time. Due to its ultra-secrecy, the U.S. intelligence community referred to the NSA as "No Such Agency".
Vietnam War
In the 1960s, the NSA played a key role in expanding American commitment to the Vietnam War by providing evidence of a North Vietnamese attack on the American Naval destroyer during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A secret operation, code-named "MINARET", was set up by the NSA to monitor the phone communications of Senators Frank Church and Howard Baker, as well as key leaders of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., and prominent U.S. journalists and athletes who criticized the Vietnam War. However, the project turned out to be controversial, and an internal review by the NSA concluded that its Minaret program was "disreputable if not outright illegal".The NSA has mounted a major effort to secure tactical communications among U.S. armed forces during the war with mixed success. The NESTOR family of compatible secure voice systems it developed was widely deployed during the Vietnam War, with about 30,000 NESTOR sets produced. However, a variety of technical and operational problems limited their use, allowing the North Vietnamese to exploit and intercept U.S. communications.
Church Committee hearings
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, a congressional hearing in 1975 led by Senator Frank Church revealed that the NSA, in collaboration with Britain's SIGINT intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam war leaders such as Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock. The NSA tracked these individuals in a secret filing system that was destroyed in 1974. Following the resignation of President Richard Nixon, there were several investigations into suspected misuse of FBI, CIA and NSA facilities. Senator Frank Church uncovered previously unknown activity, such as a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. The investigation also uncovered NSA's wiretaps on targeted U.S. citizens. After the Church Committee hearings, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was passed. This was designed to limit the practice of mass surveillance in the United States.1980s to 1990s
In 1986, the NSA intercepted the communications of the Libyan government during the immediate aftermath of the Berlin discotheque bombing. The White House asserted that the NSA interception had provided "irrefutable" evidence that Libya was behind the bombing, which U.S. President Ronald Reagan cited as a justification for the 1986 United States bombing of Libya.In 1999, a multi-year investigation by the European Parliament highlighted the NSA's role in economic espionage in a report entitled 'Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information'. That year, the NSA founded the NSA Hall of Honor, a memorial at the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland. The memorial is a, "tribute to the pioneers and heroes who have made significant and long-lasting contributions to American cryptology". NSA employees must be retired for more than fifteen years to qualify for the memorial.
NSA's infrastructure deteriorated in the 1990s as defense budget cuts resulted in maintenance deferrals. On January 24, 2000, NSA headquarters suffered a total network outage for three days caused by an overloaded network. Incoming traffic was successfully stored on agency servers, but it could not be directed and processed. The agency carried out emergency repairs for $3 million to get the system running again. Director Michael Hayden called the outage a "wake-up call" for the need to invest in the agency's infrastructure.
In the 1990s the defensive arm of the NSA—the Information Assurance Directorate —started working more openly; the first public technical talk by an NSA scientist at a major cryptography conference was J. Solinas' presentation on efficient Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithms at Crypto 1997. The IAD's cooperative approach to academia and industry culminated in its support for a transparent process for replacing the outdated Data Encryption Standard by an Advanced Encryption Standard. Cybersecurity policy expert Susan Landau attributes the NSA's harmonious collaboration with industry and academia in the selection of the AES in 2000—and the Agency's support for the choice of a strong encryption algorithm designed by Europeans rather than by Americans—to Brian Snow, who was the Technical Director of IAD and represented the NSA as cochairman of the Technical Working Group for the AES competition, and Michael Jacobs, who headed IAD at the time.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the NSA believed that it had public support for a dramatic expansion of its surveillance activities. According to Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes, the period when the NSA was a trusted partner with academia and industry in the development of cryptographic standards started to come to an end when, as part of the change in the NSA in the post-September 11 era, Snow was replaced as Technical Director, Jacobs retired, and IAD could no longer effectively oppose proposed actions by the offensive arm of the NSA.