The NSA: Even Worse Than You Think!
There is one secret Edward Snowden spilled that even the most hard-boiled anti-privacy security operative can’t ignore: The National Security Agency is broken. It is broken not just because it somehow let a contractor steal a voluminous portion of its secrets, but because many of those secrets paint a picture of a dysfunctional agency. The NSA not only can’t stop a leaker like Snowden; it’s uncertain that the NSA can do a good chunk of what’s in its job description.
Yet the agency has many brilliant projects under its belt. First and foremost, there is Stuxnet, the computer worm virus that infected over half of Iran’s computers and made its way into their Internet-isolated nuclear facilities—via some unknowing peon’s thumb drive—to sabotage Iran’s uranium-enrichment centrifuges and set their nuclear development back by months if not years. Based on White House leaks, David Sanger has reported that the NSA and Israel’s Unit 8200 co-developed Stuxnet. From a technical standpoint, it is the single most brilliant computer virus I have ever seen, precision-targeted yet flexible enough to spread through (needed) multiple vectors.
The NSA has always been on the cutting edge of encryption, designing the widespread Secure Hash Algorithms and driving standardization of Suite B. I entirely believe that they may have made a cryptographic breakthrough allowing them to crack most encryption in use today. And their intelligence work within local combat contexts, as with the Iraq surge in 2007, has frequently been respectable.
The question, then, is how an organization capable of such technical brilliance could also fall prey to organizational incompetence such as giving unaudited root access to a sysadmin contractor like Edward Snowden. In light of the agency’s achievements and the default rah-rah attitude toward issues of national defense, it is tempting to give the NSA the benefit of the doubt when a Snowden happens. That would be wrong. As I saw in my time at Microsoft, great technical skill can exist uneasily within organizational structures that kill innovation.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/09/nsa_incompetence_ways_to_fix_the_national_security_agency.html
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