One
theme that emerges from early 2003 SIDtoday installments is that the
NSA was grappling with how to handle advances in information
technology, particularly the proliferation of mobile devices and
online networks.
One article
in the “Customer Relations” series described several “dynamic
dissemination products” to help SID “change with … our
customers,” including an initiative to distribute “secret-level
information” to wireless devices, a technique for disseminating
“NSA product” to tablet computers, and a system to view secret
documents on unclassified computers over the internet, bypassing the
need for a high-security enclosed area known as a SCIF. These efforts
foreshadowed Hillary Clinton’s controversial use, as secretary of
state, of a BlackBerry device to traffic in sensitive government
information after the NSA reportedly rebuffed her request for a
special secure device from the agency.
[...]
SID was also
still exploring the rapidly evolving internet. One article described
how the NSA was improving its integration with the public internet
via a program called OUTPARKS. Another touted the NSA’s annual
SIGDEV conference, a major event in which analysts from the “five
eyes” intelligence agencies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the
United Kingdom, and the United States share techniques for developing
new SIGINT. The article noted that the 2003 SIGDEV would include
workshops on “social network analysis,” “internet research,”
and “wireless LANs,” that is, wifi networks.
Other NSA
staff apparently required more basic forms of training. “Do you
know you can make SIDtoday your browser homepage?” asked a June
2003 article, with instructions on changing the default homepage in
the web browsers popular at the time: Netscape and Internet Explorer.
Source:
.. the experienced, top analyst,
William Binney (who is the central figure of the documentary),
deconstructs the myth of an organization that is supposed to be
pioneer in new technologies. He presents NSA as an organization
which had certain difficulties to follow the explosive progress of
the computer technology during 1990s, in order to modernize its
obsolete equipment as fast as possible.
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