Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (75 page)

Even if
the avalanche of signals could successfully be diverted back to Fort Meade,
there would never be enough people to process it all. "Supposing you pipe
every communication that goes on in China back to the United States," said
the senior Sigint official. "Then you've got to have somebody process it.
You've got to have a linguist listen to it. And the chances of your ever
digging out from under the pile of information and finding what's important [are]
miniscule. . . . You don't have the linguistic resources to deal with that kind
of problem."

The answer
is using powerful computers to filter as much intercepted information as
possible at the front end—the point of interception—such as at Menwith Hill
Station, NSA's massive satellite listening post in central England.
"You've got the antenna," said the senior Sigint official, "and
now, next to it, in a building, you've got the filter. . . . You filter it by
finding out some identifier of a person or an entity that will allow you to
pick off that person's communications and throw away everybody else's. . . .
You're going to run some identifier in the message against a category of
identifiers that you have in a dictionary [computer] somewhere."

One such
identifier, he said, is the target's telephone number. "And what you're
looking for is a communication going to that telephone number. So in comes a
dialed number that's a different dialed number— [the filter] ignores it, goes
away until it hits on one. . . . All we're doing is we're comparing the
communications that are out there against a target list, and if they don't hit,
nothing ever happens to the ones that get rejected. You don't see them, they
don't get stored. . . . The stuff that does hit goes to an analyst—maybe
they're back here [NSA headquarters] someplace—to look at it. ... Reality of
life is that you're talking about a small percentage of everything out there
that even gets vacuumed. ... So what I'm saying is that there's a first cut.
You've got to decide where you're going to vacuum."

Given this
burgeoning increase in worldwide telecommunications now confronting NSA,
concern has been growing in Congress. Some believe that NSA, through years of
mismanagement, is depending far too heavily on the old, reliable systems while
failing to prepare for the tidal wave of new technologies now beginning to
crash down on the agency. Barbara McNamara candidly agrees. "So far,"
she said, "the National Security Agency is lagging behind."

High on
NSA's worry list is the shift from microwave and satellite communications—whose
signals NSA was adept at capturing with its eavesdropping satellites and
ground-based stations—to buried fiber optic cables. "Technology has now
become a two-edged sword," said Hayden. "On the dark days it has
become the enemy."

According
to a senior NSA official, by the fall of 2000 only 2 percent of AT&T's
voice and data communications were transmitted over microwave towers in the
United States. And AT&T had virtually given up on domestic satellite
communications, except for Alaska. Instead, it is selling its satellite voice
and data circuits to the rapidly growing direct-TV industry. "AT&T
invested very heavily in the '70s in satellites in order to move great volumes
of information," said the official. "Right now AT&T is selling
off all of their domestic satellite coverage. . . . There's a lot of change
going on here, and a Sigint enterprise has to look like that which it
targets."

By turning
instead to buried fiber optic cables, said the senior NSA official, AT&T
was able to double its capacity in just ninety days. Made up of bundles of
tiny, hair-thin glass strands, fiber optic cable offers greater volume, more
security, and higher reliability. Thus, where satellite communications are as easy
to collect as rain, fiber optic signals require the skills of a mole.

So worried
was NSA about the difficulty of eavesdropping on fiber optics that in the early
1990s it fought against export of the technology to Russia. For example, the
United States denied an export license to US West, Inc., for a proposed
trans-Siberian cable project. Now NSA must deal with a second, far more
sophisticated generation of fiber optic technology.

Greater
and greater volumes of material—from 400-page books to megabyte-hogging
animated graphics to full-length movies—are being shoved through the narrow
straws that make up the communications networks. Says MIT's David Clark,
"The ability to get bits down a fiber is growing faster than Moore's
law," which predicts that computer power will double every eighteen
months. The carrying capacity of fiber, said Clark, is doubling every twelve
months.

Scientists
are now developing methods to greatly multiply the numbers of fiber optic
channels in existing cables while at the same time rolling out miles and miles
of new cable. The new technology, known as wavelength division multiplexing
(WDM), consists of sending multiple signals down the same straw at different
wavelengths. The technique has been called the fiber optic equivalent of parallel
processing. By 2001 WDM had become a $4 billion business, and fiber optic cable
was flying out of factories as if tied to a speeding harpoon. According to John
MacChesney, an optical fiber pioneer at Bell Labs, the factories were
"producing hundreds of kilometers of fiber drawn to precise dimensions at
a rate approaching sixty miles an hour." At the same time, the production
costs had dropped from $1 a meter in 1980 to about $.05 a meter in 2001.

One such
system is known as Project Oxygen, so called because it is an attempt to
breathe new life into an old technology. If signals are sent at sixteen
different wavelengths through each of four pairs of optical fibers, information
can be transmitted through a single transatlantic cable at 640 gigabits per
second—the equivalent of 10 million simultaneous telephone calls.

In 1998
Lucent Technologies unveiled its new WaveStar OLS 4006 system, which it claimed
could carry over a single strand of fiber the equivalent of the entire
Internet. Its speed was such that it could also transmit the equivalent of over
90,000 encyclopedia volumes in one second. The company achieved this capability
by using what it called ultra-dense WDM. "Leapfrogging current competitive
offerings," said the company, "Lucent's new optical networking system
can be configured to handle up to eight fibers, each transmitting 400 gigabits
per second, to give communications providers a maximum capacity of 3.2 terabits
(or 3.2 trillion bits) per second of voice, video and data traffic."

AT&T
was to be the first customer for Lucent's new system, and by 2001 the company
had signed contracts with firms in Europe and Asia. Among them were the
Netherlands' KPN Telecom B.V., Spain's Telefónica de España, Korea Telecom, and
even China's Posts and Telecommunications Administration.

The system
was designed by Lucent's subsidiary Bell Labs, which for many years has had a
very close and very secret relationship with NSA. For two decades William O.
Baker served on NSA's Scientific Advisory Board. At the same time he also
served, at various points, as research chief, president, and chairman of the
board of Bell Labs. The first operational fiber optic system was developed
under Baker at Bell Labs. Among the members of what is now the NSA Advisory
Board are former State Department official Arnold Kanter; former DIA director
Lieutenant General James Clapper; and James Adams, chairman of iDefense, Inc.
The executive secretary is NSA's David P. Kokalis.

NSA has
also joined with Lucent and a number of domestic telecommunications companies,
including Verizon, to form a consortium called Multiwavelength Optical
Networking (MONET). MONET will research advanced fiber optic techniques,
including routing/switching and optical monitoring.

In 1998,
the first large submarine cable designed for multiwavelength operation was
turned on. It forms a loop connecting the United States with Britain, the
Netherlands, and Germany. When the newer WDM technology is in place, its
capacity will be more than 1,000 times greater than that of the first fiber
optic cable, which began service only about a decade earlier. Engineers are
planning to lay 168,000 kilometers of the cable, enough to circle the earth
four times. More cable will be laid by other companies. Said David Clark of
MIT, "We're going to drown in fiber."

Another
problem facing NSA is the growing difficulty of tapping into the Internet—a
series of complex, interconnected communications lines that encase the earth
like a tangled ball of sewing yarn. Every one hundred days the Internet doubles
in size. Also up is voice traffic, which increases in volume at 20 percent a
year. This is largely as a result of new digital cellular communications, which
are far more difficult for NSA to analyze than the old analog signals. Rather
than consisting of voices, the digital signals are made up of data packets that
may be broken up and sent a myriad of different ways. "Today you have no
idea where that information is being routed," said one intelligence
official. "You may have somebody talking on a telephone over a land line
and the other person talking to them on a cell phone over a satellite. You
don't know how it's being routed, it's going through all kinds of switches, the
information is not where you think it is, and that's what has created the
complexity and that's what we have to figure out how to deal with."

"The
mere fact of digitizing the signals gives it some level of protection,"
said one former NSA official. "But if you really hit it with a
hard encryption system, digital encryption, it's a
forget-it situation."

Encryption
was once an area where NSA held a monopoly. But after a disastrous period
during the 1990s when the agency attempted to outlaw the export of powerful
encryption software, it has now virtually given up. "Crypto policy is the
wave of the past," said former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker. To worry
about encryption sales was like locking a door on a house without walls.
Restricting American sales would do nothing to prevent foreign nations from
selling equally powerful encryption tools. "No matter what we do,
encryption is here and it's going to grow very rapidly," said John Millis.
"That is bad news for Sigint, so it is going to take a huge amount of
money invested in new technologies to get access and to be able to break out
the information that we still need to get from Sigint." According to one
senior NSA official, in the fall of 2000 only 10 percent of communications were
encrypted. But for NSA, the projections were frightening. Within seven years,
he estimated, fully 85 percent of all communications will be hidden in complex
ciphers.

As a
result of the House Intelligence Committee's push to focus attention on NSA's
problems, news reports began painting the agency as losing its hearing.
"Difficulties posed by new technologies also threaten to make the NSA's
'big ears' increasingly deaf," said one report, on CNN. A headline in
Newsweek
read: "Hard of Hearing," adding, "The National Security
Agency has fallen behind in the high-tech battle against terrorists, hackers
and other threats."

Although
life may be somewhat more complicated for NSA, and eavesdropping may become
even more difficult years down the road, much of this criticism is overblown. The
agency is certainly not going "deaf" today—a point made by Michael
Hayden. "One criticism is that we're omniscient and reading everybody's
e-mail," he said, "and the other is that we're going blind and deaf.
It can't be both."

According
to information obtained for
Body of Secrets,
NSA has managed to find
ways to tap into all of these new technologies—including fiber optic cables—and
is pulling in more communications than ever. This was revealed in a highly
classified closed-door discussion at NSA on September 30, 1999, between NSA
Deputy Director for Services Terry Thompson and members of the agency's
technical workforce.

"The
projections that we made five, six, eight years ago," said Thompson,
"about the increasing volumes of collection and what that's going to mean
for our analysts have all come true, thanks in large part to the work that
you-all and others have done. We're much further ahead now in terms of being
able to access and collect network data, fiber optics, cellular data, all the
different modalities of communications that we are targeting, and that results
in a lot of output for our analysts. Our tools are coming along okay to help
process and reduce the backlog, but there's still a huge requirement for human
beings at the end of the day to figure out what's important, and that boils
down to language work and IA [intelligence analysis] work."

Thompson
explained how NSA breaks into the Internet by hiring people who have special
knowledge of key U.S. companies that make critical components for the network.
With their help, the agency reverse-engineers the components in order to
eavesdrop on the systems. Among the most critical components of the Internet
are routers made by Cisco Systems, a California company. These are specialized
microcomputers that link two or more incompatible computer networks. They act
as a sort of postal service, deciding where to route the various messages
carried over the network. "Virtually all Internet traffic travels across
the system of one company: Cisco Systems," says a Cisco television ad. By
discovering the weak spots and vulnerabilities in this "postal
service," NSA can target and intercept much electronic mail.

During the
discussion with the technical workforce about short-term hiring by NSA,
Thompson said, "If you can see down the road two or three or five years,
and say, Well, I only need this person to do reverse engineering on Cisco
routers, that's a good example for about three or five years, because I see
Cisco going away as a key manufacturer for routers and so I don't need that
expertise. But I really need somebody today and for the next couple of years
who knows Cisco routers inside and out and can help me understand how they're
being used in target networks." In fact, NSA recently recruited a Cisco engineer
to be the top technical adviser to its new transformation office, which is
charged with moving the agency forward in the new century.