James Bamford's Body of Secrets (2001)
On the southbound lane of the Baltimore—Washington Parkway, near
the sleepy Maryland hamlet of Annapolis Junction, a restricted, specially
constructed exit ramp disappears quickly from view. Hidden by tall
earthen berms and thick trees, the ramp leads to a labyrinth of barbed-
wire fences, massive boulders placed close together, motion detectors,
hydraulic antitruck devices, and thick cement barriers. During alerts,
commandos dressed in black paramilitary uniforms, wearing special
headgear, and brandishing an assortment of weapons including Colt
9mm submachine guns, quickly respond. They are known as the "Men in
Black." Telephoto surveillance cameras peer down, armed police patrol
the boundaries, and bright yellow signs warn against taking any
photographs or making so much as a note or a simple sketch, under the
penalties of the Internal Security Act. What lies beyond is a strange and
invisible city unlike any other on earth. It contains what is probably the
largest body of secrets ever created.
.....
Nearby residents can only guess what lies beyond the forbidden exit
ramp. County officials say they have no idea how many people work
there, and no one will tell them. Traffic planners from the county
planning department, it is said, once put a rubber traffic-counting cord
across a road leading to the city, but armed guards came out and quickly
sliced it. "For a long time we didn't tell anybody who we were," admitted
one agency official. "The focus was not on community activity. [It was]
like everyone outside the agency was the enemy."
In an effort to ease relations with its neighbors, officials from the city
gave Maryland's transportation secretary, James Lighthizer, a rare tour.
But the state official was less than overwhelmed. "I didn't get to see a
darn thing," he said.
At a nearby gas station, owner Clifford Roop says the people traveling
into and out of the city keep to themselves. "They say they work for the
DoD [Department of Defense]. They don't talk about their work at all."
Once, when a reporter happened into the station and began taking a few
notes, two police cruisers from the secret city rushed up to the office and
demanded an ID from the journalist. This was not an unusual response.
When a photographer hired by real estate developers started up a hill
near Crypto City to snap some shots of a future construction site, he was
soon surrounded by NSA security vehicles. "They picked him up and
hauled him in and asked what he was doing," said Robert R. Strott, a
senior vice president at Constellation Real Estate, which was a partner in
the project. During interrogation the photographer not only denied
attempting to take a shot of Crypto City, he said he had never even heard
of NSA. Worried that occupants of an eleven-story office building might
be able to look into the city, NSA leased the entire building before it was
completed.
.......
Crypto City's yearly consumption of electricity—409,005,840 kilowatt-
hours, carried over 662 miles of wires—equals that of Maryland's capital,
Annapolis. And with over six acres of computers, twenty-five tons of air-
conditioning equipment pumping out over 6 billion cubic feet of cool air a
year, and more than half a million lightbulbs to power, the city burns up
54 million watts of electricity a day. That leaves the secret city with a
shocking monthly electric bill of nearly $2 million, which makes it the
second largest user of electricity in the entire state. In 1992 Crypto City
consumed 3.5 trillion BTUs of oil, electricity, and gas—the equivalent of
33 million gallons of fuel oil.
.........
By 2001, the SRC had long since broken the teraflop barrier and was
approaching petaflop speeds—at which point time is measured in
femtoseconds, the shortest events known to science. With such
extraordinary speed, a machine would be capable of pounding a stream
of intercepted, enciphered text with a quadrillion—a million billion—
possible solutions in the time it takes to wink. Original estimates by
scientists were that the outside world would reach that point sometime
around 2010, but IBM intends to cut the wait in half with a mega-
supercomputer dubbed Blue Gene.
Over five years, between 2000 and 2005, the company plans to build
the fastest computer on earth—500 times faster than anything currently
in existence. "It will suck down every spare watt of electricity and throw
off so much heat that a gas turbine the size of a jet engine is required to
cool it off," said one report. According to the company, the computer
would be about forty times more powerful than the aggregate power of
the forty fastest supercomputers in the world today—or 2 million times
more powerful than the fastest desktop in existence.
The ultimate goal of Blue Gene is to solve a puzzle of a different sort
from those at NSA—although NSA may also secretly be a customer. Blue
Gene's singular objective is to try and model the way a human protein
folds into a particular shape. Because proteins are the molecular
workhorses of the human body, it is essential to discover their molecular
properties. In a sense, Blue Gene is like NSA's old RAMs, which were
designed to attack one specific encryption system.
When completed, Blue Gene will consist of sixty-four computing
towers standing six feet high and covering an area forty feet by forty feet.
Inside will be a mind-boggling one million processors. The target speed is
a petaflop.
When NSA crosses the petaflop threshold, if it hasn't already, it is
unlikely that the rest of the world will know. By 2005 the SRC, with
years of secret, highly specialized development accumulated, will likely
be working with computers operating at exaflop speeds—a quintillion
operations a second—and pushing for zettaflop and even yottaflop
machines, capable of a septillion (102*) operations every time a second
hand jumps. Beyond yottaflop, numbers have not yet been named. "It is
the greatest play box in the world," marveled one agency veteran of the
NSA's technology capability. "They've got one of everything."
Operating in the exaflop-and-above world will be almost
unimaginable. The key will be miniaturization, an area in which NSA has
been pushing the theoretical envelope. By the mid-1990s, NSA's Special
Processing Laboratory had reduced the size of a transistor so much that
seventy of them would fit on the cross section of a human hair. NSA is
also attempting to develop a new generation of computer chips by
bombarding light-sensitive material with ions to etch out microscopic
electronic circuit designs. Using ion beams instead of traditional light in
the process provides the potential for building far smaller, more complex,
more efficient chips.
In the late 1990s NSA reached a breakthrough when it was able to
shrink a supercomputer to the size of a home refrigerator-freezer
combination. Eventually the machine was pared down to the size of a
small suitcase, yet its speed was increased by 10 percent. In 1999, a
joint NSA and DARPA program demonstrated that portions of a
supercomputer could be engineered to fit into a cube six inches on a
side—small enough to fit into a coat pocket. The circuitry was made of
diamond-based multichip modules and cooled by aerosol spray to remove
the 2,500 watts of heat from the system.
.............
NSA has had a strong interest in quantum computing as far back as
1994, when Peter Shor, a mathematician at Bell Laboratories, which has
long had a close and secret relationship with the agency, discovered the
codebreaking advantages of the new science. Since then, NSA has spent
about $4 million a year to fund research at various universities, and put
additional money into studies at government laboratories.
Operated at top speed, a quantum computer could be used to uncover
pairs of enormously large prime numbers, which are the "passwords" for
many encryption systems. The largest number that ordinary
supercomputers have been able to factor is about 140 digits long. But
according to another Bell Labs scientist, Lov K. Grover, using quantum
computing, 140-digit-long numbers could be factored a billion times
faster than is currently possible. "On paper, at least," said Glover, "the
prospects are stunning: ... a search engine that could examine every
nook and cranny of the Internet in half an hour; a 'brute-force' decoder
that could unscramble a DES [Data Encryption Standard—the
encryption standard used by banks and most businesses] transmission
in five minutes."
A quantum computer could also be used to speed through
unfathomable numbers of intercepted communications—a "scan" in NSA-
speak—searching for a single keyword, a phrase, or even, with luck, a
"bust." Long the secret leading to many of NSA's past codebreaking
successes, a bust is an abnormality—sometimes very subtle—in a
target's cryptographic system. For example, it may be an error in a
Russian encryption program, or a faulty piece of hardware, or a sloppy
transmission procedure. Once such a hairline crack is discovered, NSA
code-breakers, using a massive amount of computer power in what is
known as a brute force attack, can sometimes chisel away enough of the
system to expose a golden vein of secret communications.
