Pros: Breakthrough view, still relevant, lucid, daring, suggestive
Cons: Only the very surface is covered
The Bottom Line: Bamberg's classic should be read, but with care since the NSA is undergoing the most massive change since its first organization for the Cold War.
wickengel's Full Review: James Bamford - The Puzzle Palace: A Report on Ame...
Bamberg's book was nothing short of a revelation at its publication in the early 1980s. It caused a sensation. And even today people read this cursory study as if it really did tell all that there was to learn about the most secretive NSA.
Once so highly classified that even its acronym was forbidden to be used, "No Such Agency" has been behind the scenes working quietly from the beginning of the Cold War. It continues its work today even afterward.
The world, of course, has changed utterly since Truman signed the NSA into existence. And the NSA has been increasingly visible as defections and slips and blunders have made some of its operations known. The media have gone wild imagining what the NSA is up to, positing Big Brother with operational arms even more sinister than those of the covert action arms of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence family.
Clearly NSA was devoted to signals intelligence and cryptography. Clearly also the NSA gathered unto itself brilliant minds numbering in the tens of thousands, and it existed in a kind of classification heaven, protected from the peering eyes of budget authorities and the wiles of the ever-winnowing press.
Now a great hubbub has arisen over the future of the NSA. Some of what it is supposed to have done (no one outside knows much about that explicitly, and compartments keep those inside largely ignorant of the whole) has been given over to such fledgling organizations as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Many recent gaffs have become very public. Even the acquisition style of the NSA would make old operators wince--the Groundbreaker outsourcing chief among those.
Where once NSA's prowess could be maintained by fiat, now technology has become nearly uncontrollable. Light signals are not the provenance of NSA, so how does the agency handle everything from flashing lights to fiber optics to laser relays? No one is sure. And the software revolution, including a new revolution in cryptography, makes code breaking extremely difficult, even for the agency with the greatest computing power in the world.
One of the disadvantages of the NSA is its lack of human resources. This is more than to say that the NSA does not have a CIA within in. I have been told by those who know that the adversarial posture of NSA vis-a-vis the CIA often is favorably disposed to NSA's having an edge, but who can be sure in any given situation.
NSA probably had very little edge in reading Saddam's traffic for lots of reasons, and who knows how much of the terrorists' traffic is penetrated when much of what passes runs through the global networks in curious ways.
Bamberg's revelations therefore could use some updating, as could the NSA itself. Poised against a monolithic and somewhat predictable Threat, the NSA was the perfect listening post. Poised against a variegated threat with an entirely new technology base, another picture emerges entirely.
Reorganization, disarray, massive outplacement and trouble connecting old and new make the NSA a moving target now. Secrecy alone cannot save it, yet the atmosphere is tense. The young despise the old, yet the old have the corporate knowledge and the FIRE to know how to operate. Then too we have the inter-service rivalry, the reorganization of the Army (with three separate models running parallel!) and the encroachment of civilian attitudes.
These are tough times in the military and intelligence environments, and the transitional dynamics make continuous operations difficult. The idea that the NSA or any organization could make absolute intelligence of all information transmitted in the world is pure nonsense. Yet putting the public at ease without imputing that the NSA has such power might prove fatal. After all, the NSA has a rep.
Read Bamberg, yes. His work belongs on the shelves of everyone interested in the intelligence apparatus of the US (and its allies). Like Bletchley Park, Ft. Meade is now so public, one wonders why the bother. But ask yourself as you read this book whether the Puzzle Palace can be anything like what we need today. More, ask yourself whether something that for so long has been right could change in time to be right again--in time.
Technology flies. Can the NSA fly fast enough to count? And if it cannot, what can? If we did not have the NSA, we would have to invent it.
Count on this: the Threat cares, even if we do not.
Describes and assesses the activities of the National Security Agency, the nation's most secret government agency--established in secrecy, many times ...More at Alibris
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