How We Spy is Important Too

Great piece in today's Washington Post Outlook section on how the NSA operates, and questions whether or not it's the best way to do it. That NSA sticks too hard to operational tactics that worked in the 20th century and has done little to switch to communication methods of the 21st.

The NSA was designed to monitor a relatively contained number of official communications pipelines in nation-states -- for example, microwave transmissions from Moscow to an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) base in Siberia. But as Michael Hayden, then NSA director, told me in an interview in late 2002: "We've gone from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state -- and we could do that pretty well -- to chasing a communications structure in which an al Qaeda member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting edge, and for which he has had to make no investment for development."

The result is that the NSA is overwhelmed by millions of phone calls and e-mail contacts that it simply can't digest. . . . As a December 2002 report by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee noted, "Only a tiny fraction of the daily intercepts are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data."

Moreover, communications between terrorist groups today, says one intelligence official, is either "air-gapped" -- in which a document or computer disk is hand-delivered by messenger (as was seen in the letters allegedly exchanged between al Qaeda chieftain Ayman Zawahiri and Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi) -- or it occurs through Web sites. . . . What the NSA really needs to do, say Arquilla and others, is to . . . summon the Turings of our day -- mainly computer hackers -- to snare al Qaeda and other terrorists at the only place they still communicate electronically, on Web sites. An added benefit, Arquilla adds, is that "if we went the route of a much greater emphasis of intelligence collection on the Web and Net, we would learn a lot more and intrude less on civil liberties."

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., notes that . . . the terrorists, wary of phone monitoring, are communicating through couriers on the ground and coordinating plots on the Web. When Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was arrested in July 2004, his laptop contained plans for simultaneous attacks on London and New York that were to have been transmitted electronically. Today, adds Hoffman, the most sophisticated terrorists have learned to evade the NSA altogether. "They keep their messages in a draft file on a Web site, then give someone the password and user name to get in. The NSA can't track that, because it's stationary."

. . . According to an NSA spokeswoman, . . . the agency began a campaign in 2004 to recruit about 7,500 new employees over the next five years. Among them will be close to 350 computer scientists, along with engineers, language analysts and a slew of new signals analysts, cryptologists and mathematicians. But, . . . many of the best people, some of whom are illicit hackers, simply cannot be vetted through today's security clearance process.