December 5, 1999
A Top-Secret Agency Comes Under Scrutiny and May Have to Adjust
Related Article
Privacy Group Sues for U.S. Files on Spying (Dec. 4, 1999)
Naval Petty Officer Is Accused of Giving Russia Information (Nov. 30, 1999)
By JAMES RISEN
ASHINGTON -- No government organization has been better
insulated from public scrutiny than the National Security Agency.
Its very existence as America's premier eavesdropper and
code-breaker was classified for decades, and the NSA -- also known
as "No Such Agency" -- has been able to keep the press and
Congress largely at bay even as the CIA has come under increased
scrutiny in the wake of its Cold War excesses and failures.
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Agence France-Presse
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More to eavesdrop on: Satellite dished in China.
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But the NSA's isolation may be finally coming to an end. Critics
on one side are now complaining that the NSA has become obsolete in
the Internet age, while critics on the other flank are attacking
the agency for emerging from the Cold War as a Big Brother without
a cause, listening to everything around the globe for no good
reason.
"NSA's problems are people and management problems," said one
agency consultant. "They just haven't been willing to change the
way they have always done things."
Some of its failings were on display last week, when the
government announced that a Navy code expert had been charged with
passing secrets to Russia five years ago while working at the NSA
But NSA's problems go far deeper. In effect, the agency is under
attack today both for incompetence and omnipotence. Its predicament
suggests that its own obsession with secrecy has left it prey to
conspiracy theorists, while at the same time making it difficult
for the agency to seek the help it needs to fix its real problems.
Some current and former U.S. intelligence officials argue that
the agency has become overly bureaucratic and outdated, a Cold War
relic that is no longer able to lure the best young computer
wizards to its headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. They warn that the
NSA is struggling to keep up in an era in which the daily volume of
e-mail messages and cell phone calls threatens to overwhelm it.
At the same time, sophisticated, commercially available
encryption technology is making it much tougher for the agency to
sift through that mountain of intercepted communications and
decipher the few messages that are actually important to the
nation's security.
Still other critics complain that a decade after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the NSA is still vacuuming telephone, fax, e-mail and
other Internet traffic as if the Soviet Union still existed. To
them, the agency is not a Cold War relic but a Cold War beast in
need of taming.
Created in 1952 to consolidate the nation's far-flung
communications intelligence and code-breaking operations into one
agency within the Defense Department, the NSA quickly became the
crown jewel of the intelligence community. Its code breakers
enabled American presidents to regularly read the mail of America's
enemies -- and its friends. The agency's high-tech collection
efforts were so highly prized that it grew into the country's
biggest intelligence agency.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Congress and the White House
have reduced the NSA's budget. But those cutbacks have come just as
the Internet has exploded, revolutionizing communications
technology. The use of telephone and computer encryption is also
certain to expand sharply over the coming years, as Washington
moves to open up the export of advanced encryption software.
As Seymour M. Hersh wrote in the Dec. 6 New Yorker, the spread
of such technology has already crippled the agency's collection
efforts. In a speech last year, John Millis, the staff director of
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, warned that
while the NSA had traditionally been at the cutting edge of
technology, "in the last four or five years technology has moved
from being the friend to being the enemy" of the agency.
But the NSA has also been attacked for accumulating far more
power than it needs. Its huge international communications
collection and monitoring operation, called Echelon, which is
conducted jointly with the agency's counterparts in Britain,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is criticized both in this
country and overseas as an excessive intrusion into the private
communications of Americans and their allies.
As James Bamford, the author of the classic study of the agency,
"The Puzzle Palace" (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), recently noted in
The Washington Post, the Echelon system relies on satellites and
ground stations to intercept and then sort global communications,
searching for specific names, words or phrases. The NSA's computers
can then sort out intercepted communications that include names of
drug dealers or political leaders or references to espionage or
terrorist actions. The agency is prohibited from intercepting
strictly domestic communications unless it gets a special court
order.
The NSA, in a prepared statement, said that its new director,
Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, is trying to address the technological and
management problems facing the agency by launching a restructuring
program this winter that he calls "100 days of change." The
program is designed to "provide the momentum for the workforce to
shape the agency, so that it can thrive in the years to come."
