EXCERPTS

FOREWARD

During academic year 2007-2008, I was one of two professors selected to be sabbatical visitors at the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters facility inside Fort Meade, MD. When the sabbatical year was over, I returned during the subsequent summers to continue working, first at NSA and later at an affiliated think tank called the Institute for Defense Analyses Center for Computing Sciences (IDA/CCS)... The secret world is largely unknown to most Americans. It is, in some ways, like the dark side of the moon. Before we got a good look, the dark side was a mystery and a breeding ground for legends: Aliens surely had bases there, or Russians surely had bases there, or both, or worse. When NSA does appear in the news, it is usually described in a negative way: Here be monsters… This book describes the people who work “inside” and what life felt like to me as a person constantly jumping between my life “outside” as a professor and software entrepreneur and my life “inside” trying to use statistical analysis to keep our and our allies’ countries safe.

The Walls and the Halls: NSA Outside the DARKROOM

I took the short version of the very interesting course on “Denial and Deception”. That was a wicked pleasure for a professor, who is supposed to be in the Truth Business…

More Academic than the Academics

Surprisingly, what I found in my corner of the NSA was a much closer approximation to the academic ideal. I was amazed at the level of intellectual activity in the Math Research organization…

Kill Chain

Few sabbatical opportunities involve death. This one did, in a way…The work done in Math Research is at the very distant end of the kill chain, but it is still in the chain. Some parts of the work are farther removed from a trigger pull than others, some closer…

The Real People of NSA

Some people know that the comedian Wanda Sykes had at one point worked in a clerical capacity at NSA, and she may be the most visible black alumna of the Agency. But ROSIE stayed in a long time, and I noticed that she was a key member of a large circle of black women who probably ran the Agency behind the scenes… If the sergeants really run the Army, and the chiefs really run the Navy, then the Sisters may really run the NSA…

The Fourth Amendment: A Dangerous Job Killer

An unfortunate caricature of NSA is that its people are constantly involved in unconstitutional plots to violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States…My experience at the bottom of the system has been quite the opposite. In fact, the Agency’s insistence that I be up-to-date on the legal limitations of NSA surveillance almost cost me my job more than once.

SCAMP: Mixing the Monastic with the Secular

The short term activities at CCS … are called “SCAMPs”. There are usually two or three SCAMPS every summer, running for 12 or 13 weeks. It is tempting to believe that “SCAMP” is a contraction of “summer camp”. It is not; there is an official name that contracts to SCAMP (Special Cryptologic Advisory Math Panel), but, hey, it really is a summer camp — for propeller-heads, code-monkeys, and other uber-geeks…

Loosey-Goosey

Life in CCS can be very good compared to life at NSA. The entire building is a SCIF, so conversation is much freer than at NSA. You can see SCIFs depicted in movies, in which the heroes stuff themselves into a cramped, airless vault within a vault to say things they cannot say elsewhere. Bowie’s SCIF is big and airy, full of sculpture and art, chess boards, white boards, and soft furniture. It is the King of SCIF’s…

Cookie Time

To complete the picture of the work environment at CCS, consider “cookie time”. Every day at 3 pm, all resident nerds are expected to leave their burrows and join in the cookie time event in the large common area. A cart is wheeled in full of cookies, potato chips, and sometimes Cheetos. The cart is mobbed. Conversation erupts around deep and obscure technical topics…

The Women of Bowie

Several of the new female research staff hires have added, among other things, a new level of sociability to a group that tends toward classical geeky introversion. That made for a different lunch dynamic… I can recognize top talent, and this group of women has it…

High Level Security: What’s a Happy Hour?

Despite the hijinks when the official material is clumsy, everybody from the Director on down is dead serious about security. The important things get done right. The rest, though, can get a little goofy. CCS folks know the difference between life and death and Mickey Mouse. They react badly to Mickey and his friends. That’s a good thing.