What Is the NSA?

Last issue, while snooping around America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), we noticed something important. Though the CIA gets more press, the National Security Agency (NSA) actually "employs more people and consumes more cash." Could this possibly be true? It is.

So why does the CIA get all the attention? Because that's exactly the way the NSA likes it. For decades, the U.S. government didn't even admit the NSA existed. It did its work secretly, governed by executive order. The joke for those in the know was that NSA stood for "No Such Agency." Today, let's snoop around this cryptic intelligence group.

Civilian vs. Military Intelligence

The NSA got its start in 1952, when President Harry Truman created it with a secret stroke of his executive pen. Congress had already created the CIA five years earlier, with the National Security Act of 1947. But the civilian CIA didn't eliminate the various military intelligence services, nor did it focus on doing what the military services did best: intercepting and reading an enemy's mail, overhearing its private conversations, and cracking its secret codes.

To consolidate the military's intelligence gathering for the Cold War, the NSA put all the military's eavesdroppers and codebreakers under one general or admiral, who reported directly to the Secretary of Defense. It's been that way ever since. While the NSA employs tens of thousands of civilians--including more math PhDs than anyone else--it remains inside the Defense Department. It even has its own troops, in a special branch called the Central Security Service.

HUMINT vs. SIGINT

To avoid superfluous spying, the civilian CIA sticks to what spymasters call HUMINT, or human intelligence. When James Bond makes contact with a double agent inside enemy territory, or gives a bad guy the back of his hand, that's HUMINT. The NSA's bailiwick is SIGINT, or signals intelligence, and while it doesn't sound nearly as glamorous, many think it's far more powerful.

The NSA uses a worldwide web of state-of-the-art satellites, listening posts, and intercept stations to capture and record huge volumes of the world's communications. It then runs these communications through some of the world's most powerful computers, scanning for keywords or patterns that require an analyst's attention. An unofficial agency motto: "In God we trust. All others we monitor."

Domestic vs. Foreign SIGINT

Officially, the NSA performs its SIGINT sweeps only "against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers." But that doesn't mean the communications of U.S. citizens aren't sucked into NSA computers. NSA officials point out that, in today's world, there is no clear and easy distinction between domestic and foreign communications.

"The networks have collapsed into one another," said one official, "and many of our targets are on the same network that we use. It is now just 'the network'--the global telecommunications infrastructure." So, when U.S. citizens do appear in NSA data, analysts withhold their names from intelligence reports. But the information remains in the files, and there are exceptions that allow for its release.