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The National Cryptologic Museum
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Mar 12, 2008 11:01 PM
from the look-at-all-the-secrets dept.
from the look-at-all-the-secrets dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The NSA's once small National Cryptologic Museum is bigger and better, with new more immersive exhibits like a reconstruction of a listening post from the Vietnam war. The place seems to be caught between the urge to keep your mouth shut and the pleasure of telling war stories. In time, though, the story notes that the need to tell stories wins out. Has anyone visited lately?"
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Submission: NSA's Museum is Bigger and Better by Anonymous Coward
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I tried to visit once (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I tried to visit once (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I tried to visit once (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I tried to visit once (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I tried to visit once (Score:5, Interesting)
Methinks anyone who would believe the hidden dirt road idea doesn't know what the average NSA employee is like. The CIA has a joke: "An optimist at the NSA is someone who looks at YOUR shoes when they walk by." I've literally had NSA employees jump in surprise when I said hello to them. Most of the time, if you look them in the eye they look away. It's a weird place. A lot of the people made we wonder how Garanamils missed such a huge marketing opportunity.
I'm going to visit the museum in a week, actually. Never went there when I had the clearances but it should be fun. I live in Charlotte now, home of one of the Projector twins. IIRC, there was a post about part of it being solved a couple of years ago. Wasn't there a mistake in it? Something like that.
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There used to be a kind of convention in Washington where if you said you worked for "The State Department" it was understood you meant the CIA. Normally people who worked for State would say something like "I work in the office of the Undersecretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs," which would be totally comprehensible to anybody on the DC cocktail circuit. People who worked for the NSA said they worked f
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Not true. Back in the day you could drive right up to the buildings, if you were dropping off or picking up an employee for example. Now, let's just say security is a bit tighter.
It's a cool place. (Score:5, Informative)
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That's cos the labels won't be declassified for another 30 years.
I might have to take another trip up there some time.
I don't think the NSA wants visitors picking the mushrooms.
Also, don't forget to get the kid's NSA coloring book they hand out.
Let me guess. The instructions are ROT13'ed and concealed in the image data. Outlines are drawn
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http://david.zakar.com/blog/?p=118 [zakar.com]
Relevant section:
"This leads into my two biggest complaints about the museum:
* There is basically no substantial coverage of post-Korean War crypto.
* There is absolutely no coverage of civilian advancements and events."
I'm glad that they fixed the former, but did they finally give civilian advancements their due?
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First, the museum typically trails history by about 50 years -- the time period for automated declassification of all but the most sensitive secrets (i.e. news of cracking the German's Enigma isn't going to affect the current war.) But serious civilian work in cryptography didn't really begin to take place until 1972 with IBM's invention of Lucifer / DES. Prior to that, civilian cryptography, if it was ever considered by
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Make sure you get a dosant for your tour - they add a lot of context!
Made a visit last summer... (Score:3, Insightful)
With the stuff they tell you there now, about the 60s and 70s, it's almost unfathomable what they DON'T tell us about what's going on now.
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My dad referred to it as "No Such Agency".
Been there (Score:5, Funny)
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No worry there, this being
And being
Re:Been there (Score:5, Funny)
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Did I mention she isn't a geek?
First thought (Score:2)
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Opening moment (Score:5, Funny)
Heh, that one' easy (Score:3, Insightful)
No one will answer yes (Score:2)
Worth the trip (Score:5, Informative)
SIGSALY was also interesting - I didn't know that voice encryption was possible during WWII.
I also found it amusing that they had a Connection Machines CM5. Sure, the CM 5's blinkin' lights are cool! But it was personally funny to me because my future brother-in-law used to work for Connection Machines and had a hand in their design and consturction. After I got home, I said to him, "Hey Sam, I saw some of your handy work in the NSA's museum".
The volunteers working at the museum were all retired NSA or military intelligence. These guys actually worked with some of the equipment on display and could expertly explain technical details.
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No, it's not. It's fairly easy to learn a small set of grammatical rules that are similar to your native language, or a set of incredibly simple grammatical rules.
Give anybody a massaged data set from a concatenative language and they'll figure out the morphology pretty quick - but be absolutely unable to manipulate it in any meaningful or naturalistic way until they have hundreds of hours of exper
Google Earth location (Score:3, Informative)
39 7'2.78"N x 7646'7.85"W
Or as a link: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.118071,-76.76737&z=16&t=h&hl=en [google.com]
Re:Google Earth location (Score:4, Informative)
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Crypto museums (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a neat little museum. Everything there is familiar to people in the field, but it's nice to see the actual hardware.
I would have liked to see hardware from the NSA/IBM foray into cryogenic computing. NSA funded a long effort from 1960 or so to build a 1GHz computer, decades before anybody else. ("I want a thousand megacycle machine! I'll get you the money" - NSA director) IBM developed components that ran in liquid nitrogen. Apparently some special purpose hardware was built using this technology, but not a full-scale computer. The components were too big (each gate required a tiny coil) and ICs won out.
SIGSALY is a reminder of just how hard it was to do anything with WWII electronics. SIGSALY is straightforward; it's a speech encoder and digitizer fed through a one-time key system. The keys were stored on phonograph records, made in pairs and shipped in advance. This was VoIP, version 0.000001. The system thing took 40 racks at each end, and a staff of fifteen at each site to keep it running. The record turntables had to be mechanically synched; there was at that time no memory device suitable for storing even a modest portion of the of key so that the thing could be synchronized electronically. There was no clock sent on the data channel; synchronization was entirely manual. Unclear why they did it that way. The display at NSA is a mockup.
Bletchley Park in the UK is also worth a visit. Go on a weekend when the volunteers show up; the weekday guides don't know much about the technology.
NSA's current cyrogenic computing effort - 100GHz (Score:5, Interesting)
I did some Google searches, hoping to find some historical info on NSA's cryogenic computing efforts, and found this [nitrd.gov], a 2005 plan out of NSA to build a 50-100GHz computer by 2010.
They want faster CPUs, not more CPUs. The commercial world isn't even trying any more. After reading this paper, one can see why. By throwing a few hundred million, and liquid helium, at the problem, they might get a 20x performance gain over commercial microprocessors. The CPU has to run at 4 degrees Kelvin, liquid helium temperature. And it has to be kept at 4K while dissipating about a kilowatt.
The technology is totally nonstandard. The basic components are Rapid Single Flux Quantum devices running at 4K. The logic voltage power voltage is 3-5 mV. Signals are around 200 microvolts. This stuff requires custom semiconductor fabs to make.
Getting data out of the low-temperature zone is a very tough problem, and optical interconnects have to be used. The proposed memory bandwidth is huge: "For example, a particular architecture may require half a million data streams at 50 Gbps each between the superconducting processors and room-temperature SRAM." Developing devices to drive the output data links from the low temperature zone, without causing too much heating in the cold part of the system, is a big part of the problem.
The justification for all this is in Appendix E, and sounds totally bogus. Either there's some desperate need for this technology they don't mention, or it's a boondoggle. There must be something important for which parallelism won't work. It's surprising to see this from NSA, because most signal analysis and crypto problems parallelize well.
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I was there two weeks ago (Score:5, Interesting)
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is cool and all, but the Cryptologic Museum struck me on an entirely different level. Instead of the "Here is how computing evolved" theme of the Mountain View museum, I really felt like this was the "Here is why computation is relevant to communications (and warfare)" counterpart. They display voice and data encryption tools of the last five decades, from STE's and STU-III's back to (as other posters mentioned) the mechanically-synchronized SIGSALY machine that used giant turning vinyl records to encrypt the traffic. There is a handset you can pick up to hear pre-recorded messages representing the voice quality of each system. The oldest were barely intelligible, the newest are (obviously) crystal clear.
The Cray XMP and YMP are impressive, and are in almost flawless condition! Rather than the exhibit at Mountain View, it felt like these machines were just recently taken out of service, and could easily be made operational again. They didn't seem like they'd been cobbled back together or had sat in closets neglected and falling apart for years. The density of some of the components on the Thinking Machines CM-5 memory and processor slices is impressive, and the descriptions of the power and cooling apparatus required (think many kilowatts and lots of Fluorinert) were equally amazing -- truly a testament to what can be done when money isn't much of an object, and a machine's value is measured solely in MIPS or MFLOPS.
There is a three-foot-tall full-relief wooden replica of the Great Seal of the U.S. on the wall, which apparently was a gift from Russian schoolchildren to the U.S. embassador in Moscow. After hanging prominently on the wall for years in the embassador's office in Moscow, in 1952 it was discovered that it contained a resonant cavity eavesdropping bug on the inside that was very difficult to detect with sensing equipment of the time, unless it was activated by radio signal (presumably by Soviet spies) from the outside. I met there three (very proud) tourists of Russian descent who chuckled heartily at that one (and who tried to teach me how to say "Medvedev" properly, thanks!)
As everyone else mentioned, the working Enigma machine was fun to encipher a message to a friend with (they have a pad and pencil for you to use), and the displays on the history of the agency and of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts were well put together. The GRAB II and Poppy ELINT satellites were especially interesting to me, and reminded me of the kind of things a senior class at the USAF Academy might build for a project these days (relics of an era when launch considerations and electronics density actually drove simplicity into designs).
If you're an electronics/history/information assurance/security/aerospace/DC trivia fan, you'll almost certainly enjoy the trip, even if the facility is kind of small and out of the way. While you're in the area, go see the Udvar-Hazy center, too! And don't forget to tip your docents...
Very cool. (Score:2)
One thing I wondered about when I was there: SIGABA/ECM [nsa.gov] was touted by our tour guide as something which still hasn't been broken, even with modern computers. This seemed unlikely to me, especially after realizing how easily Enigma can be bruteforced (given any known plaintext) -- but then I read about Solitaire/Pontifex [schneier.com] in Cryptonomicon, and it makes me wonder...
Pictures (Score:3, Informative)
Yea (Score:2)
Really neat setup. Easily spent over two hours browsing around this small museum. Mostly on reading about the war stories. They just had a lot of neat stuff.
You could actually encode and decode your own messages with actual ENIGMA machines. They had the actual bombe's that broke it, and tons of other stuff. The people there are also extremely helpful, knowledgeable, and nice. Even if you're just one person, they'll give you a whole tour and answer whatever questions you have.
Ashamed to admit... (Score:2)
Yeah, But It's Not the Real Deal Unless (Score:2, Funny)
. . . the guide hollers "Red Badge!" before you enter every room.
(Sorry - inside joke.)
How Ironic (Score:2)
It says it's located "...NSA Headquarters, Ft. George G. Meade, Maryland" but nothing you can look up.
Check out the Museum's library too (Score:2, Interesting)
"Nothing to see here, please move along..." (Score:2)
worth a visit, if you are nearby. (Score:2)
It is a bit off the beaten path, but worth a visit if you are in the area.
What was the motel's name? (Score:2)
(Peter Wayner, I'm shocked that you didn't have that in the NYT article. Or did you, and it was edited out?)
- Robin
Definitely worth a visit (Score:2)
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Don't Feed the Trolls.