NSA reliance on civilian technicians exposed by Snowden reveals potential intelligence vulnerabilities

154 CHAPTER NINETEEN The Rise of the NSA “There are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback,” -- National Intelligence” — James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence In the Game of Nations, which is played at a level that often is not visible to public scrutiny, the great prize is state secrets that reveal the hidden weaknesses of a nation’s potential adversaries. The most important of these in peacetime is communication intercepts. It was just such state secrets that Edward Snowden took from the NSA in the spring of 2013. Before that breach, America’s paramount advantage in this subterranean competition was its undisputed dominance in business of obtaining and deciphering the communications of other nations. The NSA was the instrument by which the United States both protected its own secret communications and stole the secrets of foreign nations. The NSA, however, has an Achilles’ heel: it is dependent on civilian computer technicians who do not necessarily share its values to operate its complex system. Because of this dependence, it was not able in 2013, as it turned out, to protect its crucial sources and methods. Snowden exposed this vulnerability when he walked away with, among other documents, the 32,000 page-long country by country descriptions of the gaps in America’s coverage of the communications of its adversaries. Even though the Cold War had been declared over after the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter of a century earlier, the age-old enterprise of espionage did not end with it. Russian and China still sought to blunt the edge that the NSA gave the United States. So the Snowden breach cannot be simply looked as an isolated event. It needs to considered in the context of the once and future intelligence war. The modern enterprise of reading the communications of other nations traces back in the United States to military code-breaking efforts preceding America’s entry into the First World War The invention of the radio at the end of the nineteenth century soon provided the means of rapidly sending and getting messages from ships , submarines, ground forces, spies, and embassies. These over-the-air messages could also be intercepted from the ether by adversaries. If they were to remain secret, they could not be sent in plain text. They had to be sent in either code, in which letters are substituted for one another, or, more effectively, cipher, in which numbers are substituted for letters. Making and breaking codes and ciphers became a crucial enterprise for nations. By 1914, the US Army and Navy had set up units, staffed by mathematicians, linguists and crossword puzzle-solvers to intercept and decode enemy messages. After the war had ended in 1918, these units were fused into a cover corporation called the “Code Compilation Company,” which moved to new offices on 37" Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. Under the supervision of the famous cryptographer Herbert O Yardley, a team of 20 code-breakers was employed in what was called the “Black Chamber.” Yardley arranged for HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020306