Word: nsa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Reagan Administration is belatedly moving to stanch this immense intelligence drain. The President has quietly signed a document known as National Security Decision Directive No. 145. It gives overall responsibility for ensuring the security of communications in the Government and the defense industry to the National Security Agency (NSA), the secrecy-shrouded behemoth whose primary function since its founding in 1952 has been the collection and analysis of other nations' communication traffic. Under Reagan's directive, the NSA will search for ways of protecting the integrity of sensitive telecommunications and federal computer information, which increasingly are two interrelated...
...total at between 2,000 and 3,000 units. One reason the Government has been slow to install scrambled lines has been the cost: each secure unit runs about $31,000. Another has been complaints from users that voice quality is poor. Even so, concedes Walter Deeley, the NSA'S deputy director for communications security, a study he conducted last year on communications security showed telephones to be the biggest leakage problem...
Working with five of the nation's largest manufacturers of telephone equipment, (AT&T, ITT, Motorola, RCA and GTE), NSA officials believe technology has been developed that will lead to what Deeley, in computer jargon, calls "a user-friendly secure phone" at a cost of less than $2,000 a unit. Scrambling units in current use weigh about 70 lbs. and take up the space of two filing-cabinet drawers. Electronics experts expect the new units to employ small, inexpensive microcircuits built directly into the telephone receiver. The scrambler converts signals produced by conversation into electronic "white noise" that...
Deeley predicts that production of the new generation of secure phones will begin within two years. By the end of the decade, NSA officials plan to install half a million of them: 200,000 in Government offices and an additional 300,000 in private companies that have access to classified or sensitive Government information. Within ten years they expect the total number of secure telephones in the U.S. to reach 2 million, or about one out of every 120 of the nation's horns. "Communication security is not like guns, ships or bullets," says Deeley. "It's sort...
...atmospheric transmission are easily interceptible on Soviet listening equipment that is doubtless installed in the U.S.S.R.'s diplomatic properties in the U.S. and elsewhere. The Kremlin's listening post in Cuba, for example, can pick up virtually all traffic from U.S. domestic communication satellites. Says an NSA official: "They just sit down there with their huge vacuum cleaner and suck everything up." In recent years the Soviets have developed computers that can cull such intelligence with much more sophistication than earlier models, and not just in search of defense secrets. "A computer can put together those bits...