New Report On NSA Released Today 81
daveschroeder writes "George Washington University has today released a three-volume history of NSA activities during the Cold War (major highlights). Written by agency historian Thomas R. Johnson, the 1,000-page report, 'Cryptology During the Cold War, 1945-1989,' details some of the agency's successes and failures, its conflict with other intelligence agencies, and the questionable legal ground on which early American cryptologists worked. The report remained classified for years, until Johnson mentioned it to Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian, at an intelligence conference. Two years later, an abstract and the three current volumes of the report are now available (PDF) from GWU and the National Security Archive. Aid, author of the forthcoming history 'The Secret Sentry: The Top Secret History of the National Security Agency,' says Johnson's study shows 'refreshing openness and honesty, acknowledging both the NSA's impressive successes and abject failures during the Cold War.' A fourth volume remains classified. Johnson says in an audio interview: 'If you are performing an operation that violates a statute like FISA, it's going to come out. It always comes out.'" And reader sampas zooms in on a section in Document 6 about the growth of NSA's IT: their first Cray purchase in 1976, the growth of circuits between facilities, and internal feuds over centralized IT development vs. programmers-in-departments. "A young systems engineer named [redacted] was urging NSA to look at some technology that had been developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 1969 DARPA had developed a computer internetting system called ARPANET... NSA quickly adopted the DARPA solution. The project was called platform."
Some interesting highlights... (Score:5, Informative)
...are in another Wall Street Journal article [wsj.com]. On Vietnam:
Another area of interest is the legal issues with which the NSA has always grappled:
Re:On an unrelated note... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, and no. You need two subcritical masses, which when shot together are critical or supercritical.
(this is nothing you can't glean from wikipedia)
Re:Biggest Failure?? (Score:2, Informative)
The Cuban Missile Crisis was VASTLY more significant an intelligence failure than 9/11. There's no comparison!
Simply put: If the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone south, billions of people would have been dead in a few short years. (After nuclear winter set in, and all the crops died.)
9-11 involved the destruction of some buildings in one city, and the deaths of thousands of people.
There's no comparison.