The National Cryptologic Museum 133
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?"
cool place (Score:-1, Interesting)
Re:It's a cool place. (Score:-1, Interesting)
Re:I tried to visit once (Score:5, Interesting)
Another AC starting at -1... (Score:-1, Interesting)
Once upon a midnight fair
I pinged a host that wasn't there
It wasn't there again today
The host resolved to NSA.
NSA is still recruiting for leading figures in the fields of mathematics, cryptography, and quantum physics. To apply, simply pick up your phone, call your grandmother, and ask for one!
Heh. I'm so old, I don't just bitch about the recent change that's resulted in AC posts moderated (-1, Informative), but I remember when that last paragraph was a joke :)
Re:Worth the trip (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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...
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.
Re:I tried to visit once (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Check out the Museum's library too (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I tried to visit once (Score:3, Interesting)
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 for "The Department of Defense". Very few people would have known about the agency in the first decades of its existence, in fact in the early days its existence was a secret. But people know that the DoD had employees who didn't talk about what where they worked.
The NSA has roots that go back as far as 1949, during the height of the Red Scare. This story -- while it may well be apocryphal -- is no more odd than many things the government of the era did in the cloak-and-dagger game. And you can't start an agency like the NSA overnight. It's not like you can put an announcement in the Federal Register and have a couple of thousand employees a few months later.
Still, the best place to hide something is, as Poe observed in The Purloined Letter, in plain sight. It would make much more sense to give the early agency a small building on the site of an extremely large and busy military installation. But it doesn't mean that the people who did the initial organization necessarily had the sense to see that.
In any case, the NSA HQ building at Fort Meade is really cool; if you were wandering around looking for the NSA headquarters you'd have no trouble figuring out which one it is: it's the one that looks like a huge, shiny black box.
True NSA computing story (Score:2, Interesting)
I was a codebreaker in the Army Security Agency from 71 to 77 and for the last five years worked at NSA. Taught myself programming to help automate some of the analysis I was doing at the time and was fortunate enough to work on some of the incredible hardware they had in the basement then. In 77 I had to decide whether to stay in (and stay poor on Army pay - about 10K/yr then) or get out and do real work, and interviewed with a number of DOD contractors around DC. When I told the interviewer the CDC mainframe model I last programmed, he confidently told me that CDC didn't make that model yet. I managed to convince him they did by describing some of its attributes and got the job, thereby doubling my pay.
The VN listening post exhibit is interesting. Brought back a lot of memories from when I was stationed is SE Asia during the latter part of that war, helping to process the stuff those guys were intercepting. Fascinating work, and if it wasn't for the Carter-era hiring freeze, I'd still be solving those puzzles for a living.