National Security Agency

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Security Agency intercepts and stores roughly 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other communications every single day. That figure, published in a 2010 Washington Post article, is not a wartime emergency measure. It describes routine operations. Yet for decades, the agency's very existence was classified. The U.S. intelligence community referred to it by a nickname that captured the absurdity: "No Such Agency."

  Founded in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman, the NSA grew from a small code-breaking unit formed during World War I into what is described as the world's largest single employer of mathematicians. It sits within the Department of Defense, answers to the director of national intelligence, and specializes in signals intelligence, a discipline that covers everything from intercepted radio transmissions to hacked smartphones. It also runs a parallel mission: protecting U.S. government communications from exactly the kind of intrusions it conducts against others.

  For much of its history, how the agency actually operated remained hidden from Congress, from courts, and from the public. A 1963 newspaper editorial asked what would happen if another government agency had committed "a similar series of tragic blunders" and concluded that an aroused public would demand accountability. With the NSA, no such reckoning came easily. This is the story of how that changed.

• 2. From Cipher Bureau to Cold War Giant

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  On the 28th of April 1917, three weeks after Congress declared war on Germany, the U.S. government established a Cable and Telegraph Section, also called the Cipher Bureau, headquartered in Washington, D.C. On July 5 of that year, Herbert O. Yardley was assigned to lead it. At that moment, his entire staff consisted of himself and two civilian clerks.

  The unit absorbed the Navy's cryptanalysis work in July 1918, and when World War I ended on November 11 of that year, it relocated to New York City as the Code Compilation Company. Its real purpose was breaking the diplomatic communications of foreign governments. At the Washington Naval Conference, it handed American negotiators decrypted messages from multiple delegations, including Japan. The agency also persuaded Western Union, then the largest telegram company in the country, to illegally share cable traffic from foreign embassies. Other communications companies joined briefly before pulling back publicly.

  Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson shut the Cipher Bureau down in 1929, famously defending the decision with the line: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." The hiatus did not last. World War II produced the Signal Intelligence Service, which targeted Axis communications. After the war it became the Army Security Agency, and on the 20th of May 1949, all cryptologic activity was folded into a new body called the Armed Forces Security Agency. That organization failed to coordinate with civilian agencies like the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI. President Truman ordered a review, and in December 1951 the panel's findings led to a redesign. On the 24th of October 1952, the National Security Council issued a revised directive. That same day Truman signed a second memorandum, and on November 4, Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett formalized the change by renaming the AFSA the National Security Agency.

• 3. Vietnam and the Limits of Intelligence

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  In the 1960s, the NSA provided the intelligence that helped expand American military commitment to Vietnam. Specifically, the agency supplied evidence of a North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. naval destroyer during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Declassified documents later showed that the NSA had misinterpreted or overstated its signals intelligence, lending credibility to reports of a second North Vietnamese attack that very likely never happened.

  While feeding intelligence that drove the country deeper into war, the agency simultaneously turned its surveillance capabilities on Americans who opposed that war. A secret program code-named MINARET monitored the phone communications of senators Frank Church and Howard Baker, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., prominent journalists, and athletes who had publicly criticized the conflict. An internal NSA review eventually concluded that the MINARET program was "disreputable if not outright illegal." The tracking records were held in a secret filing system that was destroyed in 1974.

  The NSA also deployed the NESTOR family of secure voice systems during the war, producing about 30,000 sets. Technical and operational problems limited their effectiveness, and North Vietnamese forces were able to exploit and intercept U.S. communications in the gaps. The contradiction at the heart of those years was stark: the agency best positioned to protect American communications had also created conditions in which its own overreach would eventually come under congressional scrutiny.

• 4. The Church Committee and Its Aftermath

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  In 1975, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Senator Frank Church led congressional hearings that dragged the NSA's activities into public view. The committee revealed that the agency, working alongside Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, had routinely monitored the international communications of anti-Vietnam War figures such as Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock. The surveillance records on these individuals had been destroyed in 1974, the year before the hearings began.

  The Church investigation also uncovered a CIA plot, ordered during the administration of President John F. Kennedy, to assassinate Fidel Castro, along with NSA wiretaps on targeted U.S. citizens. The breadth of the findings prompted a direct legislative response: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, designed to impose limits on mass surveillance within the United States.

  One year before those hearings, in 1986, the NSA intercepted Libyan government communications in the immediate aftermath of the Berlin discotheque bombing. President Ronald Reagan cited that interception as providing "irrefutable" evidence of Libyan involvement and used it to justify the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya. The episode illustrated a pattern that would recur: signals intelligence gathered in secret, interpreted by the agency, and then put forward as the factual basis for consequential government action.

• 5. Building the Surveillance Infrastructure

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  ECHELON began as a Cold War intelligence-sharing arrangement among five English-speaking nations: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, known collectively as the UKUSA group. Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell first reported publicly on the program in 1988, describing how it extended the UKUSA agreement into a global signals intelligence network. On the 3rd of November 1999, the BBC reported that the Australian Government had confirmed the existence of a network code-named Echelon capable of eavesdropping on phone calls, faxes, and email "anywhere on the planet," with the U.S. and Britain as its chief operators. The base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire was confirmed to be linked directly to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade.

  The NSA's domestic collection operation ran under tighter legal constraints, at least formally. Executive Order 12333, signed in 1981, confined the agency to collecting "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence" and prohibited acquiring information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reaffirmed in October 2011 that Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches apply to the contents of all communications, comparing a person's private communications to personal papers.

  On the technical side, a network outage at NSA headquarters on the 24th of January 2000, lasting three days, exposed how fragile the infrastructure had become. Emergency repairs cost $3 million. Director Michael Hayden called it a "wake-up call." Some incoming traffic was rerouted to Britain's GCHQ while the repairs were made. That outage foreshadowed a wider problem: by 2006, the agency had completely maxed out the electrical grid at Fort Meade, and Baltimore Gas and Electric was unable to sell it additional power.

• 6. The War on Terror and Trailblazer

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  After the September 11 attacks, the NSA moved quickly to expand its surveillance reach. Two internal programs competed for the agency's direction. ThinThread had sophisticated data-mining capabilities and included a privacy mechanism: surveillance data was stored encrypted, and a warrant was required for decryption. Director Michael Hayden chose instead to fund Trailblazer, which did not carry ThinThread's privacy protections.

  Trailblazer ramped up in 2002. The contractors brought in to develop it included Science Applications International Corporation, Boeing, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, and Litton Industries. NSA whistleblowers raised serious internal concerns about the project, triggering investigations by Congress and the inspectors general of both the NSA and the Department of Defense. Trailblazer was canceled in early 2004 without delivering on its objectives.

  A successor program called Turbulence began in 2005, built in small test pieces rather than as a single large plan. It added offensive cyber-warfare capabilities, including the ability to inject malware into remote computers. Congress criticized Turbulence in 2007 for exhibiting the same bureaucratic failures that had plagued Trailblazer. Meanwhile, under PRISM, which started in 2007, the NSA began gathering Internet communications from nine major U.S. service providers, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. The data collected included email, video, photos, and file transfers. On the 11th of March 2004, President Bush had signed an authorization for mass surveillance of Internet records that also applied retroactively, a decision that Attorney General John Ashcroft and Acting Attorney General James Comey had nearly resigned over the day before.

• 7. Snowden and What the Leaks Revealed

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  In June 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began releasing internal NSA documents that described the full scope of the agency's surveillance operations. The leaks revealed that the NSA was intercepting and storing the communications of over a billion people worldwide, including American citizens, and tracking hundreds of millions of people's movements through cell phone metadata.

  One internal tool, code-named Boundless Informant, showed that between February 8 and the 8th of March 2013, the NSA collected about 124.8 billion telephone data items and 97.1 billion computer data items around the world. The FASCIA database, also disclosed during this period, contained trillions of device-location records including cell tower IDs, equipment identity numbers, and subscriber network numbers; over roughly seven months, more than 27 terabytes of location data had been collected.

  The Tailored Access Operations division, active since at least around 1998, had been quietly intercepting routers, servers, and other hardware being shipped to surveillance targets, installing covert firmware before delivery. An NSA manager described this as "some of the most productive operations in TAO." A device called Cottonmouth could be inserted into a computer's USB port to establish remote access. In a separate disclosure, a secret memo showed that in 2006 the NSA had pushed a flawed random number generator called Dual EC DRBG onto the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the International Organization for Standardization, apparently to create a cryptographic backdoor. On the 4th of September 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the surveillance program exposed by Snowden had been unlawful, and added that the intelligence leaders who publicly defended it had not been truthful.

• 8. Fort Meade and the Physical Scale

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  NSA headquarters occupies 350 acres of Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, about 20 miles southwest of Baltimore and 25 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. The main building, described by author James Bamford as resembling "any stylish office building," contains more than 3,000,000 square feet of floor space. Bamford noted that the U.S. Capitol could fit inside it four times over. The outer walls are covered in one-way dark glass lined with copper shielding to trap signals and prevent eavesdropping from outside.

  The complex includes over 100 watchposts, a cafeteria, a credit union, airline ticket counters, a barbershop, a bank, its own post office, its own fire department, and its own police force. The NSA Police, formerly the NSA Security Protective Force, are armed federal officers who operate a K9 division for explosive detection. In September 1986, President Ronald Reagan dedicated the copper-shielded Operations 2A and 2B buildings, which became part of what workers called the "Big Four."

  By 2011 the NSA was Maryland's largest consumer of power, buying as much electricity as the city of Annapolis. To address that constraint, the agency began construction on the Utah Data Center at Camp Williams, roughly 25 miles south of Salt Lake City. The $1.5 billion facility was designed to support the National Cyber-security Initiative, and construction finished in May 2019. A groundbreaking ceremony at Fort Meade in May 2013 launched the High-Performance Computing Center 2, a $3.2 billion project covering 227 acres with a 150-megawatt power substation, whose incremental expansions are not expected to be complete until 2030.