Secret Spy Agency
A few miles out of Washington lies an inconspicuous military installation. On most maps it does not exist. And yet it contains the largest mass of secrets in the world.

   It is home to the National Security Agency (NSA), the least visible but most powerful spy agency in America's armoury. In the enormous post-mortem exercise over what went wrong in the run-up to 11 September, all the criticism has been directed at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is how the US Government wants it. The less attention the NSA gets the better - the joke is that its initials stand for No Such Agency - and yet somewhere hidden in its massive computers there are almost certainly enough vital clues to have prevented the 11 September attacks, had anyone known where to look.

Secret world

   The NSA's job is to eavesdrop on the world's phone calls and emails, but do not try to phone them. The NSA website does not list a phone number. You do not contact them. They listen to you. You are not allowed to take any pictures of the base. Your only option is to order a video which they shot themselves.

    Though invisible  on the map, 38,000 people work at the agency every day, more then the CIA and FBI put together - every one of them sworn to a lifetime of secrecy. They have their own police force, shopping malls and sports complexes - and their own television network. On one channel you can watch live video from unmanned planes flying over Afghanistan or surf through satellite photos of Pakistan troop movements on the Kashmir border. On their secure internet, which they share with the CIA and FBI, you can read transcripts of intercepted conversations between soldiers on exercise in China, or European diplomats.

     When Osama bin Laden first moved to Afganistan, the NSA listened in to every phone call he made on his satellite phone. Over the course of two years it is believed they logged more than 2,000 minutes of conversation. It all ended when President Clinton ordered the cruise missile strike on his training camp in 1998. Bin Laden narrowly escaped with his life. He realised that the NSA was listening in and ditched his satellite phone,and ordered his aides never to talk on the phone again about operations.

     This shows the limitations of the NSA's incredible technology. Journalists cannot resist endowing spy agencies with supernatural capabilities and power. In fact their failings are all too human. September 11 is a perfect example of this. Nineteen men armed only with knives and their fanaticism successfully hatched a plot totally unnoticed by America's $40bn a year intelligence-gathering machine. They succeeded because they lived and worked, not in the shadows where spies operate, but in full view. In fact, one of the most bizzarre ironies of all this is that five of the hijackers lived in a motel right outside the gates of the NSA.

500 million hours a day

The NSA was created after World War II to stop another surprise attack like Pearl Harbor by providing early warning. But in the hour when the need was greatest, it failed the country. And it failed not because it did not have enough information, but because it had too much.

     According to author James Bamford, who has studied the NSA for years, each one of their dozen largest listening posts around the world picks up more than two million communications an hour - cell phones. diplomatic traffic, emails, faxes. That works out at 500 million hours every day. When you think that this has to be translated from a myriad of languages and then analysed, you realise that the NSA looks less like an omniscient being than a man wading through a warehouse of words in search of a few tiny diamonds.

Převzato z BBC a LN  stránku připravil Soske