Word: nsa
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Until quite recently, cryptography -- the science of making and breaking secret codes -- was, well, secret. In the U.S. the field was dominated by the National Security Agency, a government outfit so clandestine that the U.S. for many years denied its existence. The NSA, which gathers intelligence for national security purposes by eavesdropping on overseas phone calls and cables, did everything in its power to make sure nobody had a code that it couldn't break. It kept tight reins on the "keys" used to translate coded text into plain text, prohibiting the export of secret codes under U.S. munitions laws...
Around Washington, secretive types who identify themselves simply as Defense Department employees are often greeted by clerks and waitresses with Oh! You must work for the NSA! The National Security Agency, the puzzle palace of U.S. intelligence eavesdroppers, has always preferred to stay in the shadows. But lately the nsa has been forced to edge into the light. NSA recruiters showed up at a mathematics conference in Baltimore last month openly seeking specialists in areas like numbers theory for code-breaking jobs. Only U.S. citizens need apply...
QUICK, THE RAID. Everyone knows that the computer industry is fighting against viruses, malicious programs that can infect whole networks and crash them. So it stands to perverse reason that hush-hush agencies like the CIA and NSA are trying to create such bugs as offensive weapons. The latest entrant in this quest is the U.S. Army, which is soliciting bids on a half-million dollar contract to develop tactical virus weapons capable of disabling enemy computers on the battlefield. The proposal has raised eyebrows among the military's hackers. Says one Army computer-security officer: "Many of my colleagues...
...innocuous. The first was a circuit board that had been replaced but not sprayed with a special plastic that "tagged" it as an authorized repair. American officials were afraid the KGB had installed this circuit board to reroute uncoded U.S. message traffic. But the device was tested by NSA experts, who found that it did nothing improper. Security officials later discovered that some State % Department technicians had never been told about the secret tagging program and had not used the spray...
Another smoking gun was found attached to the machine that decoded incoming State Department messages; a suspicious-looking wire led through the shielded side of the box that enclosed the equipment to prevent signals from escaping. "When they found it, the NSA technicians thought they had something really exciting," says a senior expert with a chuckle. It turned out that a communications officer had installed the device; it was a buzzer that alerted him whenever cables came in for processing. The rig was thoroughly tested by the NSA and found harmless...