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National Cryptologic Museum, Fort Meade, MD
39° 6′ 53.28″ N, 76° 46′ 29.28″ W
Looking Backward at the NSA
The U.S. National Security Agency, or NSA, was once so secret that insiders joked that its initials stood for No Such Agency. But Hollywood filmmakers searching for a malevolent force more secretive and more dangerous than the CIA have brought the NSA to public attention through films such as 1998’s Mercury Rising and Enemy of the State. And the NSA’s geeky mission of code making and breaking, electronic surveillance, wiretapping, Internet monitoring, and database mining seems increasingly relevant in this age of all-pervasive electronic communication.
Nevertheless, the day-to-day work of the NSA remains shrouded in mystery. That makes the NSA’s public museum, the National Cryptologic Museum, a surprising discovery. The museum opened in 1993 and is housed in an old motel just outside the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland.
The small museum was originally open to NSA employees only, and houses a superb collection of artifacts covering the history of codes and codebreaking. Entry to the museum is free of charge.
A great starting point for a visit is the working Enigma machine used by Nazi Germany in the Second World War to encrypt messages. At the time, the Enigma machine’s codes were considered to be unbreakable, but they were in fact broken, in great secrecy, in the UK during the war (see Chapter 40). The Enigma machine on display at the NSA museum offers a rare treat, as visitors are invited to actually touch and use it to create encrypted messages.
The SIGSALY exhibit shows part of the equipment used for secure telephone communication between the Pentagon and the British War Office during the Second World War. SIGSALY weighed 55 tons and was too large to install in a government office in London; instead, it ended up installed in Selfridges department store on Oxford Street. It worked by inserting random noise into the actual conversation to mask the words spoken. By adding random noise at one end, and subtracting the same random noise at the other, it was possible to have a secure conversation: any eavesdropper would hear something akin to static. The random noise was stored on a phonograph record; each end would have a copy of the same record (which was essentially the encryption key), and the two records had to be played back at precisely the same speed so that each end stayed synchronized with the other. A single record gave just 12 minutes of secure speech.
Also on display at the museum are many examples of cryptography from well before the Second World War. A somewhat speculative exhibit on possible communication by U.S. slaves, using patterns sewn into quilts, is an early example of steganography (hiding a message so that an eavesdropper doesn’t even realize a message is being sent). The U.S. Civil War exhibit has code books and a fascinating cipher cylinder that encrypts using the Vigenère system (see Chapter 121 for details of the cipher).
The Cold War section highlights the importance of aerial reconnaissance with a complete Air Force C-130 aircraft outside the museum. This exhibit is dedicated to the memory of 17 U.S. servicemen killed when the Soviet Union shot down their C-130, which had strayed into Armenia while eavesdropping from Turkish airspace.
The Cold War also drove innovation in satellite-based reconnaissance, and the museum has an exhibit concerning the first U.S. intelligence satellites, the GRAB and GRAB II. Launched in 1960 and 1961, the Galactic Radiation Background Experiment had the overt mission of measuring solar radiation, but covertly the satellites were fitted with equipment capable of picking up and measuring Soviet radar signals. These radar signals were processed and then relayed to ground stations, enabling the NSA to gather data on Soviet radar systems from 500 miles up. Since radar (and other radio signals) travel well beyond the horizon, GRAB simply had to be positioned with a clear view of the radar site to be able to intercept the signal as it continued off into space.
More recently, computer-based encryption has become the norm, and with it computer-based attacks on encryption systems. The museum’s supercomputing exhibit includes a Cray YMP supercomputer. Built in 1993, the year the first web browser became available, the computer had 32 Gb of memory. At the time, a standard PC using the newly released Intel Pentium processor had around 8 Mb of RAM. As well as having 8,000 times the memory of a PC, the Cray YMP operated at 2.67 billion operations per second, around 3,000 times faster than the Intel Pentium appearing on desktops.
According to the museum, the NSA has the world’s largest supercomputing facility located nearby: however, it isn’t open to visitors! Despite giving no insight into the capabilities of today’s NSA (its work is top secret, after all), the museum provides a fascinating starting point for speculation about the NSA’s power.
Practical Information
Details of the National Cryptologic Museum are available from the NSA website at http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/. The museum is open Monday to Friday and the first and third Saturdays of the month. You can contact the museum by phone at 301-688-5849.
