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206 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

per, director of national intelligence, justified the secret intelligence budget by saying in an open session of Congress, "We are bolstering our support for clandestine SIGINT [signals intelligence] capabilities to collect against high priority targets, including foreign leadership targets," and to develop "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic." It was no secret to Congress, even before Snowden, that the NSA was attempting to monitor the Internet. What was a closely held secret before Snowden revealed it was that the NSA had found a way in 2007 to intercept Internet traffic before it was encrypted.

Through all this tumult, the heart of the NSA's activity remained its five-thousand-acre base at Fort Meade, Maryland. It commanded the most powerful mechanism for intercepting communications that the world had ever seen. No other country came close to its technology for intercepting information. The NSA not only was able to intercept secret information from potential adversaries but also—at least until the Snowden breach—managed to conceal these means from them. As long as these adversaries remained blind to the ways in which their communications were being intercepted, deciphered, and read by the NSA, they could not take effective countermeasures. Consequently, the NSA had the capability to provide the president and his advisers with continuous insights into the thinking and planning of potential enemies.

Keeping its sources and methods secret was no easy task. The NSA's technicians had to deal with continuous technical challenges to provide a seamless harvesting of data from a wide range of communication devices, including telephones, computers, and the Internet. It required continuous intra-agency communications between the NSA's own intelligence officers and a growing number of civilian technicians. It even had its own "Wiki-style" network through which they could discuss problems, called the NSANet. Because it could not tightly control access to this technical network, it expunged any mention of the sources and methods from the material circulated on the classified NSA network. Instead, it stored them in discrete computers, called compartments, which were disconnected from other computers at the NSA. These compartments could only be accessed by a limited number of analysts and NSA executives who had a need

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 206 9/30/16 8:13 AM
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