In Salon, Andrew Leonard looks at the early years of the NSA:
On Oct. 29, 1948, the Soviet Union suddenly changed all its ciphers and codes. What later became known as “Black Friday” delivered a huge shock to the two U.S. intelligence agencies that had conducted the bulk of American code-breaking efforts during World War II and its immediate aftermath. Before Black Friday, the Army’s SIS and the Navy’s OP-20-G complacently assumed that they had acquired the keys to most of the world’s encrypted communications. But with a flip of the switch the U.S. was once again in the dark — just as the Cold War was heating up.
“One of the gravest crises in the history of American cryptanalysis,” writes historian Colin Burke, led directly to the 1949 merging of the SIS and OP-20-G into the Armed Forces Security Agency. Three years later, another bureaucratic shuffle transformed the AFSA into the National Security Agency. A sense of panic induced by the “Soviets’ A-Bomb, the Berlin Blockade, the forming of the satellite bloc in Eastern Europe, the fall of China, and the Korean War” — all of which “were not predicted” by the intelligence agencies — encouraged the U.S. government to authorize the NSA to spend tens of millions of dollars on computer research, in the hope that technological advances would help crack the new Soviet codes.
Colin Burke is the author of It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s-1960s. Burke completed his history in 1994, but until last week, his volume of crypto-geekery had only a handful of readers. Part of a series produced by the NSA’s Center for Cryptological History, It Wasn’t All Magic was considered classified material until May 2013, and was only made available online on June 24.
Nice timing! With the NSA currently occupying its highest public profile in living memory, a look back at its early history is quite instructive. It is useful to be reminded that the mandate to spy and surveil and break codes was absolutely critical to the early growth and evolution of computer technology. Some things never change: The immense effort required to crack German and Japanese codes during World War II are an early example of the intimidating challenges posed by what we now call “big data.”
It’s actually quite surprising that it took the Soviets until 1948 to change their codes: from 1942 or so, Britain and the US were sharing their Enigma decryptions of top-secret German messages with the Soviet Union. Even if the information was provided without the original text, the Soviets were fully aware that this was the fruit of decryption, not human spy reports. At the end of World War 2, that Anglo-American expertise would obviously have been redeployed to other ends … and reading Soviet message traffic clearly would be one of the more interesting sources of data.
