NSA Slide Shows

The latest revelation from Snowden is that NSA and British intelligence stole the encryption keys for billions of cell phone SIM cards, allowing them to listen in on conversations without the assistance of the telephone companies involved merely be setting up radio receiving equipment near where the cell phone is being used.

That fact that NSA did this is not too surprising. It's safe to assume that spy agencies do everything you can think of and a lot that you can't think of. What strikes me, though, about this and the other Snowden revelations, is the form in which this information appeared within NSA and which was stolen by Snowden.  It was a "slide show", that is, a PowerPoint presentation.

I remember somebody telling me once, I don't remember who or when, maybe my parents, that if you tell someone something, it's not a secret any more. A slide show is of course specifically created to inform a group of people, presumably people who don't have much knowledge of what is going on to begin with. My point is that, if you tell too many people about it, it's not going to stay secret for very long. It seems that NSA hires, I don't know, 2,000 people maybe? 20,000? And then swears them all to secrecy and tells them everything and expects that everything will stay secret. The truly shocking thing about Snowden's revelations is that NSA seems to be spreading around a lot of information about its operations to people who don't really need it to do their jobs. It's problematic to understand the motivation for this. It may just be braggadocio. It may be to justify funding or advance careers.

In spook films like "Mission: Impossible", spy secrets are kept in vaults with exotic electronic defenses. In reality, it seems that the nation's secrets are scattered haphazardly all over God's creation. If you need more evidence of this, consider the leak to a news reporter of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity by Richard Armitage in 2003. As far as I can tell, there was no reason for Richard Armitage to know that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. It was never explained how he knew that in the first place. Yes, he was a Deputy Secretary of State, but even so he would not need to know the identity of secret agents and shouldn't know it. The fact that this question never even came up in the scandal and grand jury investigation tells you that this is business as usual.

Then there's the question of how Snowden himself had access to all this. Well, OK, he was a system administrator. But it's not that hard to encrypt files to keep system administrators from being able to read stuff they're not supposed to read. I could do it using simple tools and I'm not much of a security expert. NSA on the other hand are supposed to be encryption experts. I can only conclude that our security agencies are bloated bureaucracies that are not very focused on their mission.

Some forty years ago I expressed my dismay to a friend about how inept U.S. intelligence agencies seemed to be. He expressed the thought that they might put out disinformation to make everyone believe they were dumb so that our enemies would underestimate them.

I wish it were true.