Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (83 page)

When not
attacking crypto systems, residents of the secret city can switch their TV sets
to Channel 50, the NSA Broadcast Network. Programs are beamed from Crypto
City's own state-of-the-art Television Center, in the FANX II building.
("FANX" means "Friendship Annex"; Friendship was the old
name for the nearby Baltimore-Washington International Airport.) The facility
is completely soundproof and has two video-edit suites, a sound booth, an
audio-sweetening room, a studio, and three-D computer-graphics capability.

Among the
programs produced at the Television Center and transmitted throughout the city
is
Newsmagazine,
which features a variety of live presentations. NSAers
may also tune their television sets to the live call-in show
Talk NSA.
"If
you enjoy
Larry King Live, Imus in the Morning,
or any of the many other
interactive talk shows, you might want to give
Talk NSA
a try,"
gushed one enthusiastic NSAer. On March 25, 1998, Kenneth Minihan was the guest
on the show's forty-fifth broadcast. Seated "on location" in an NSA
warehouse, he spent an hour taking questions from viewers who dialed 968-TALK.

Lieutenant
General Minihan also was the first director to conduct a Worldwide Electronic
Town Meeting for NSA employees around the world, using an NSA computer chat
room. "Ask short, straightforward questions," the workforce was
cautioned. More than 6,000 people across the globe, many in secret listening
posts, took part in the virtual event, generating 36,711 lines of text.

In search
of something a bit more exciting, an NSAer can switch channels to the
intelligence community's own encrypted and highly secret version of CNN. As the
Defense Intelligence Network (DIN) logo fades from the screen, an anchor
introduces "Global Update," a Top Secret roundup of world events.
Although the lead story might be the same as the one on Ted Turner's
twenty-four-hour news network, DIN has unique advantages: up-to-the-second
photos from spy satellites, secret conversations from NSA intercepts, and the
latest diplomatic gossip from the DIA's worldwide corps of defense attachés.

Another
difference from CNN is that the classification (Secret, Top Secret/Umbra, and
so on) of the intelligence or the commentary appears in the corner of the
screen, sometimes changing as often as every twenty seconds. While on occasion
a bit slower than CNN to pick up a story, DIN often soars ahead, as it did when
viewers were able to watch reports of the attempted coup in Venezuela
"long before CNN made the world aware of it," said one DIN official.

Tired of
TV, an NSAer can boot up his or her computer and log on to Crypto City's own,
very secret intranet. Based on the ideas and technologies that are currently
wrapping the world in an ever-tightening mesh of interactive electrons, NSA's
"Intelink" has one key difference: it is totally hidden from the
outside world.

At the
same time that NSA's money and personnel were being cut back as a result of the
post—Cold War intelligence drawdown, more and more data were streaming into the
agency's earth station atop a small wooded hill on the northern edge of the
city. The problem was similar throughout the intelligence community. The
solution was to go online, using cyberspace to move, distribute, and access the
mountains of intelligence reports.

Connected
through a system of highly secure and encrypted cable networks, Intelink allows
NSA's technospies and analysts to surf through secret home pages and databases.
Within seconds, they can download everything from the latest intercepts on
Chinese submarine activity off the Paracel and Spratly Islands to satellite
imagery and video footage of Pakistani tank movements near Kashmir. "If
Warren Christopher wants to know about Korea," said Ross Stapleton-Gray, a
former CIA official, "he just goes over to the Korea page and he can see
the DIA analysis, the CIA analysis, the NSA intercept, and an FBI report on
Korea."

Linking
NSA with the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other members of the
intelligence and defense community, the new system is "a major
breakthrough," according to a senior Pentagon intelligence official.
"Intelink," he said, "for the first time, in a user-friendly
environment, allows every element of the intelligence community and
every element of the Department of Defense to reach into
every other element." A CIA official added, "Essentially, to a great
extent we've cloned the technology from the Internet into our communications
system."

Over
Intelink, NSA now publishes documents containing hypertext links that allow
customers to instantly obtain details concerning the original raw signals
intelligence data on which the conclusions were based, so that they can understand
the basis of an analyst's views.

High
praise for the system reaches all the way to the White House, which in the past
had to wait for the CIA's most secret reports to be delivered by the agency's
"pizza truck," as the courier van was called. Intelink can now
provide these documents almost instantly. Former Vice President Al Gore has
called the system "a brilliant use of cyberspace" that is
"bringing the intelligence community closer together than ever
before."

The idea
had its origins in a dusty, little-known "back room" of the U.S.
intelligence community: the Intelligence Systems Secretariat (ISS), set up in
1994. Key to the system was to make it completely separate and secure from the
publicly used Internet in order to prevent anyone from hacking into it. Thus,
rather than an Internet, it would be an extranet, a private system connecting
all of the supersecret internal networks and databases of the spy community,
with a thick firewall separating it from the crowded and open Internet. Among
those databases would be NSA's own internal intranet, Webworld.

In the
past, getting intelligence from the collector to the ultimate user in the field
in time to be helpful was the Achilles' heel of the system. One NSA linguist,
Fredrick T. Martin, assigned to a remote outpost in the Middle East during the
Cuban missile crisis, recalled the frustration. "Collaboration with our
counterparts elsewhere," he said, "and with NSA Headquarters meant
asking a question, forwarding it on a special teletype circuit, and waiting
until your shift the next day (if you were lucky) for the reply. Although many
improvements were made to this basic approach over the next thirty years, the
fundamental set of dissemination and collaboration problems remained."

More
recent complaints came from General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who warned that
delays in receiving intelligence reports had a serious impact on his direction
of the Gulf War. Another example is the shootdown of Air Force Captain Scott
O'Grady over Bosnia in June 1995. It was later discovered that anti-aircraft
missile batteries had been spotted earlier but the intelligence did not reach
O'Grady in time. Over Intelink, troops on the front line can now obtain
information at the same time that it is received within the White House.

With the
click of a mouse, the Netscape browser opens up to Intelink Central and the
warning, "Anyone using this system expressly consents to monitoring."
Scrolling down, the user can choose from a long list of hyperlinks to the
classified home pages of about ninety intelligence organizations. These range
from the Arms Control Intelligence Staff to the CIA's Office of Advanced
Projects to DIA's Central MASINT [measurement and signature intelligence]
Office to the Intelligence Community Librarians' Committee. For signals
intelligence information, there are links to such sites as NSA, the Regional
Sigint Operations Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and the National Sigint
Committee.

Intelink
has its own Yahoo'-style search tool called Wer'zit!? Users can also use five
commercially available search engines, such as Alta Vista.

In a major
innovation for the intelligence community, Intelink even offers secret,
around-the-clock chat rooms with the program WebChat. "If you have the
need to consult in real time via keyboard chat with a peer anywhere in the
world," said James P. Peak, the Intelink director, "WebChat is for
you." Among the chat rooms are Analyst Rooms, where issues affecting
intelligence analysts are discussed. More general discussions can be conducted
in Office Rooms. And for chat about specific areas of the world, such as the
Middle East, a person can enter Geographical Regional Rooms. Topical Rooms are
for those who wish to exchange or solicit information on specific topics. An
example is the International Organized Crime chat room.

Despite
their sensitive jobs and high clearances, the elite participants in WebChat
have caused concern within the intelligence community with "obscene and
boorish behavior." This has led to close monitoring by Intelink managers.
The posted rules on Intelink include a prohibition on the "use of fantasy
role-playing 'personas' and postings describing imaginary activities."

NSA serves
as the home for Intelink, though the intranet is used by other intelligence
agencies. Its Intelink Service Management Center operates a twenty-four-hour
command post known as Intelink Central, a spacious room with a wraparound
console crowded with computer monitors and telephones. Because Intelink serves
a wide customer base, it comprises four separate networks with different
security classifications. The first created was "Top Secret—SCI"
("sensitive compartmented information"). More than 50,000 people with
codeword clearances at over 100 different locations have access to this
network. For those cleared only to the Secret level, there is
"Intelink-S," which has about 265,000 users at some 160 locations.

The most
secret and restricted network is "Intelink-P," also known as
"Intelink-PolicyNet." Those authorized access are limited to the
president and vice president, the national security adviser, the directors of
Central Intelligence and NSA, and a small number of other officials. It
operates on a private, secure, high-bandwidth network and is used primarily to
distribute supersensitive reports not available on the other levels.

At the
other end of the spectrum there is "Intelink-U," the newest network,
which is designed to provide exclusively unclassified and open-source
materials. It is said to be the single largest data repository in the world.

Intelink
is now expanding worldwide, connecting the intelligence agencies of the United
Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States in a unique, private, Top
Secret—SCI network known as "Intelink-C" for Intelink-Commonwealth.
Officials are considering expanding even further, creating a unique, and
somewhat unsettling, invisible international espionage web.

Another—more
limited but far speedier—communications network at NSA is the Advanced
Technology Demonstration Network, which links the agency with the Pentagon's
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the DIA, NASA, the Defense
Information Systems Agency, and the Naval Research Laboratory. Using a
variation of a hyperspeed technology known as ATM (for "asynchronous
transfer mode"), information can be transferred at the astonishing rate of
2.5 billion bits a second—fast enough to send the text from nearly 500 copies
of
Moby-Dick
in one second. The applications of such a hyperfast system
are especially significant given the growing requirements to transfer
near-real-time pictures and video from spy satellites and reconnaissance
aircraft. A program known as Fastlane was recently created by NSA to develop
encryption techniques for ATM.

If
Intelink is the intelligence community's Internet, the
National SIGINT File
is
its
New York Times.
It contains, said Fredrick T. Martin, one of NSA's
Intelink founders, "a
feast
of the world's most significant events
of the day that were derived from the codebreaking side of NSA's mission."
For years, NSA's premier publication was the
SIGINT Summary,
or
SIGSUM.
But despite the fact that it contained the end product of the world's most
advanced intelligence agency, it "was published and distributed by
techniques that would be used if the
SIGSUM
were not much more than a
club newsletter," said Martin in his book
Top Secret Intranet.
Well
into the 1990s, the
SIGSUM
was published the old-fashioned way, on
paper, and was manually distributed by courier.

Eventually,
though such pioneering internal projects as Beam-rider, NSA began disseminating
its highly classified Sigint reports over secure NSA communications lines to
senior officials in Washington. This led to the replacement of the
SIGSUM
with
an electronic version known as the
NSA SIGINT Digest.
Finally, in
October 1997, NSA inaugurated its "virtual" newspaper, the
National
SIGINT File,
which completely replaced both the regular and exclusive
versions of the
SIGINT Digest.

Unlike
anything before in the spy world, the
National SIGINT File
provides a
"virtual window" into NSA's vast ocean of intercepted communications.
Its exclusive recipients can click on such options as the National SIGINT
Update, which can be specially tailored to the person's interest—nuclear weapon
transfers in Iran or terrorist movements around Africa. Updates appear
periodically throughout the day. Another option allows one to view the latest
signals intelligence on a menulike list of general topics. Still another offers
a
TV Guide—
like listing of available Sigint "finished
intelligence."