IP: NSA abandons pizza box info-delivery, switches to Intelink

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 08:35:33 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Roland Grefer <btirg () uis doleta gov>
> Subject: No more top-secret pizza boxes (fwd) 
>
> FYI.
>
> http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/editorial/story.cgi?storyid=1150070213968
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
> Headline: No more top-secret pizza boxes
> Subhead: Spies: A book by a former National Security Agency official gives
>        an unprecedented look at the super-secret agency and tells of
>        NSA's development of a computer network. 
>
>
> By Neal Thompson
>
> SUN STAFF
>
>
> "A book about NSA has never been written by an insider. 
> It was tough getting through the system because people were opposed 
> to it. There is a school of thought that says you wear your trench 
> coat and your dark glasses and you don't say anything." 
> Tom Martin,author of "Top Secret Intranet"
>
>  Espionage watchers consider the early 1990s a low point for 
> the National Security Agency.
>
> Around that time, the Internet was beginning to change how people 
> communicate, becoming a new tool for everyday life. But while 
> the rest of the nation was e-mailing each other, NSA was still 
> delivering top-secret intelligence reports to Washington inside 
> pizza boxes.
>
> An agency that in its heyday had helped create the first computers 
> had become appallingly low-tech. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf even 
> complained about it during 1991's Persian Gulf war when he 
> said intelligence reports on Iraq's military were taking 
> too long to reach his hands.
>
> That has all changed recently with the development of an internal 
> computer network for spies called Intelink, which brings up-to-the-minute 
> spy data to hundreds of thousands of spies, diplomats and soldiers 
> in the field, as well as Congress and the White House.
>
> Completed in 1996, Intelink has become an invaluable tool for 
> the 13 intelligence community agencies that use it to disseminate 
> and share their secret information.
>
> Intelink consists of highly classified data that users access 
> at the click of a button. Data that once took hours to reach 
> Washington now cross the globe in a second.
>
> Just like logging onto America Online or the World Wide Web, 
> intelligence analysts and military personnel log on to Intelink's 
> home page, where they see a map of the world and can click, say, 
> Bosnia to access intelligence reports, video clips, satellite 
> photos, databases and status reports. Users can "chat" 
> online with other spies or exchange e-mail on a topic.
>
> The evolution of NSA's in-house Internet coincides with 
> a new philosophy: Why struggle to be a technological leader when 
> it's easier and cheaper to buy all the cutting-edge software 
> we need from Microsoft and others?
>
> How the NSA changed
>
> The story behind that transformation is detailed in a new book 
> by a former top NSA official -- a book noted as much for the 
> fact that it was published at all as for its content.
>
> When Tom Martin started working for NSA in 1960, he signed a 
> letter promising never to write a book about his super-secret 
> employer. In a sign of changing times in the intelligence community, 
> Martin unveils previously classified details about how NSA spies 
> on the world.
>
> And he does so with NSA's approval. Martin's book pulls 
> back the curtain on the gears of NSA's machinery, providing 
> a rare nuts-and-bolts look at how today's high-tech spies 
> do their job.
>
> "Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink 
> -- the world's largest, most secure network" is also 
> a fascinating glimpse at the slow and sometimes reluctant thawing 
> of an obsessively secretive agency that once denied its own existence.
>
> [...]