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future history

The NSA’s Research Directorate is a descendant of the Black Room, the first civilian code-breaking group tasked with conducting cutting-edge espionage in the United States, such as the telegraph. Existing only from 1919 to 1929, the group decrypted more than 10,000 messages from a dozen countries, according to James Bamford’s 2001 book. Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret NSA. In addition to groundbreaking cryptanalytic work, the group was able to secure surveillance assistance from American cable companies such as Western Union, which could provide newly minted US spies with sensitive communications for their investigation.

The Black Room was shut down amid scandal when US Secretary of State Henry Stimson learned that the group was spying on both American allies and enemies. The event was a precursor to the 1975 Church Committee. researched The 2013 Snowden leaks exposed American intelligence agencies’ surveillance abuses and vast electronic surveillance capabilities that have triggered a global showdown.

Just eight months after the Black Room was shut down, faced with the prospect of crippling spying capabilities in the increasingly unstable world of the 1930s, the United States reformed efforts under the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. One of only three people working with the old records of the Black Room, one of the founders of SIS, which Bamford reported was kept a secret from the State Department, was mathematician Solomon Kullback.

Kullback, II. He was instrumental in breaking both Japanese and German codes before and during World War II, and later headed the research and development arm of the newly formed National Security Agency. Within a year, it had grown into the directorate as we know it today: a separate space for research uninterrupted by the agency’s day-to-day business.

“Even in a mission-driven organization, owning a research organization is important for thinking beyond a crisis,” says Herrera, but adds that the directorate dedicates some of its work to the “crisis of the day.” The NSA runs a program called “scientists on call” that allows mission analysts to face technical challenges and reach hundreds of scientists when querying information to seek help via email.

looking forward

But the lion’s share of the directorate’s work is to envision technologies that are generations later than what we have today. It operates almost like a small, elite technical college, organized around five academic departments (mathematics, physics, cyberspace, computer science, and electrical engineering) of 100 to 200 people each.

The cybersecurity department defends the federal government’s national security and the nation’s military-industrial base. This is the highest profile department and deliberately so. Over the past five years, the previously eclipsed NSA has become more vocal and active in cybersecurity. He initiated once damned public recommendations and research projects for an organization whose existence was not even acknowledged 20 years after its founding.

Now products from NSA research such as Ghidra, a free, advanced reverse engineering tool that aids in the whitepaper of hacking tools and other software, are popular, reliable, and used worldwide. They serve as powerful cybersecurity tools, recruiting ground, and public relations game all in one.

The physics department Herrera once headed runs dozens of labs that do much of the work on quantum information sciences, but it’s much broader than that. Aspect advances in raw computing power 60 years of predictable rapid computing threatens to slow and halt growth, physicists investigate new materials and new computing architectures The exact type of assignment given to the directorate when it first appeared, to steer the next generation of computing into a less predictable future.

Meanwhile, the electrical engineering department has been keeping a close eye on the physics and engineering of telecommunications networks since the first advent of the internet. It addresses every aspect of the digital world, from undersea cables to satellite communications, as well as issues with 5G.

Some prospects on the horizon don’t quite fit in a particular box. The computer science department’s work on artificial intelligence and machine learning cuts, for example, cybersecurity tasks and data analysis work with mathematicians.

Herrera repeatedly raises the possibility that the directorate needs to develop more talent and understanding of rapidly evolving fields such as synthetic biology. The NSA is hardly alone in this: Chinese military leaders have hailed biotechnology as a priority for national defense.

“Most of the competition in the world is not military anymore,” says Herrera. “Military competition is accelerating, but there’s also the spread of other technologies that are obviously worrying, such as synthetic biomes. The role of the research is to help the NSA understand what the impact of these technologies will be. I don’t know how much we’re actually getting involved, but these are areas we need to focus on.”