NSA's History of Communications Security — For Your Eyes, Too 52
Phil Sp. writes "Government Attic, those fine investigative pack rats, have outdone themselves this time. Just posted: a declassified NSA document entitled A History of Communications Security, Volumes I and II: The David G. Boak Lectures [PDF] from 1973 and 1981. This is an absolutely fascinating look into how the NSA viewed (views?) communications security and touches on all sorts of topics, including public key crypto, economics, DES, tamper-resistance, etc. It was seemingly from a collection of lectures to new employees. The first 85 pages are heavily redacted but the remaining 80 or so are largely intact. It even concludes with a cryptogram puzzle for the reader!"
Re:Redacted, huh? (Score:2, Informative)
No way! This is the NSA. Looks like they took scissors to it before photocopying.
There is one little bit on page 12 where it looks like the bottom row of "pixels" of maybe one word can be seen. I wonder if David Naccache and Claire Whelan [nytimes.com] could figure out the word.
Irony (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Redacted, huh? (Score:3, Informative)
They did not screw up this time around, at least as far as I can tell.
It looks like the page was scanned, and then areas were redacted by pasting white over them. They look too neat to have been done with scissors and paper, but that's the general look of them: white polygons pasted over various areas on the page. The edges aren't quite square so it's like someone clicked with a mouse to define the vertices, rather than selecting lines. (I.e., they were doing it after rasterization and not before, most likely.)
Then at some point after this, the document was OCRed. Hence, no redacted material in the text layer of the PDF.
You can make out, at least in a few cases, the gist of what was blanked out from context. One of the first big redactions obviously describes the sigint capabilities of the Soviets at the time. Interesting to imagine why they're still concerned about that; someone must think that by knowing what we knew about them at a particular time, you could infer something that would be advantageous...
PARKHILL (Score:2, Informative)
The info about PARKHILL is very interesting. That system was installed as a replacement for KG-13 and used for a very short time at our station. We had it for about a year before it was removed and replaced by something else. As noted on page 153 that system was not totally secure. The BLACK audio sounded like Donald Duck talking backward on acid. I suspect that someone found a way to break the code in near realtime. This was about 1982. No idea if it was fixed and rereleased for use.