NSA internal secrecy practices and Snowden breach overview

160 National Intelligence justified the secret intelligence budget by saying in an open session of Congress, “We are bolstering our support for clandestine SIGINT [signal 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, even before Snowden, that the NSA was engaged with monitoring the Internet. Through all this tumult the heart of the NSA’s activity remained its 5,000 acre base at Fort George G. 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 was not only able to intercept secret information from these potential adversaries, but it also, at least not until the Snowden breach, managed to conceal these means from them. As long as these adversaries remained blind to the ways in which its communications were being intercepted, deciphered and read by the NSA, they could not take effective countermeasures. Consequently, he 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 secrets 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. As 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 that 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 to know about the data they contained. These compartments were the final line of defense against an inside intruder. In 2009, Snowden found his way into the NSA through a temporary job with an outside contractor that had a contract with the NSA’s Technology Directorate to repair and update it back-up system. Four years later, by maneuvering to get hired by another outside contractor with access to the NSA’s sources and methods, he was able to steal secrets stored in isolated computers bearing directly on the ongoing intelligence war. Snowden also copied from these compartments in a matter of weeks, as has been previously mentioned, the NSA’s Level 3 sources and methods used against Russia, Iran and China. The Snowden breach demonstrated that the NSA’s envelope of secrecy was at best illusory. After this immense loss, the NSA’s sources inside these adversary countries were largely compromised even if they were not closed down. Once these adversaries were in a position to know what channels the NSA was intercepting, they could use these same channels to mislead US HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020312