Keeping
Secrets (6.28.00) - While computers and the Internet have made many things
easier, one area made more complex by computers is security. And it becomes
even more complicated when scientists are working on secret and non-secret
projects side-by-side.
Are terrorists and other law-breakers getting better
at making codes than we are at breaking them? The electronic intelligence
experts at the federal government's National
Security Agency (NSA) are trying to prevent that from happening. But increasingly,
the international emails, phone calls, and faxes that the NSA screens are
encrypted, or scrambled by complex mathematical formulas.
Encryption isn’t new for the NSA. As shown on PBS's
NOVA, on February 1, 1943, the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service,
a forerunner of the NSA, began a small, very secret program, later codenamed
Venona. The
object of Venona was to examine and possibly exploit encrypted Soviet diplomatic
communications. Part of the code the Soviets were using in their telegrams
was cracked, revealing that Soviet spies had obtained key secrets of the atom
bomb during the Manhattan
Project. But a lot has changed since those days.
"There's a very big difference between the days of Venona, when they actually
sat at a desk and actually used pencils and graph paper trying to figure out
a lot of the encryption, break a lot of the codes, [and] today, [when] most
code-breaking is done with very very fast, very very complex computers,"
says James
Bamford, author of Body
of Secrets.
But for all of its high-tech tools, in this time of
international terrorism, the NSA has to keep track of moving targets in a
deluge of data. "Since the end of the Cold War, the NSA has faced an
enormous number of technological problems," says Bamford. "First
of all, there's been an enormous widespread use of encryption, not only by
governments, but also by terrorists who might want to hide their activities.
In addition to that, the amount of communications available that the NSA has
to sift through is just tremendous these days. That's because of the rapid
use of new technologies such as cell phones, the whole explosion of the Internet...So
now, instead of focusing on targeted communications, the NSA has to sift through
billions of communications more every year, in the form of emails, and cell
phone calls, and data transfers and so forth."
And now the NSA is contending with a new type of code-making—steganography,
or the art of hiding a message in an innocent-looking file, like a picture
on the Internet, or even a tiny fraction of it. Binary code, the computer
language of zeros and ones that makes up each pixel of color in an image,
can be slightly modified to carry a message, and that message itself might
be in code. This greatly complicates the task of code breakers at the NSA.
"They're not only trying to pick out and break communications they know
are being sent over telephone lines or whatever, now they have to look for
communications they know are being hidden within things, like pictures on
computer screens," says Bamford. "And even once they do that, then
they still have to break whatever it is, the encryption that might be used
to hide the actual message."
So, who is winning this "code war"? "The advantage is always
going to be in favor of the code-makers, because the code-breakers are going
to have to have computers far faster and far more powerful in order to break
the encryption systems made by the code-makers," says Bamford. "[The
code-breakers are] trying very hard, but the question is whether the technological
capability and the analytical capability is enough to give them the head start
above the terrorists."
And now the NSA is contending with a new type of code-making—steganography,
or the art of hiding a message in an innocent-looking file, like a picture
on the Internet, or even a tiny fraction of it. Binary code, the computer
language of zeros and ones that makes up each pixel of color in an image,
can be slightly modified to carry a message, and that message itself might
be in code. This greatly complicates the task of code breakers at the NSA.
"They're not only trying to pick out and break communications they know
are being sent over telephone lines or whatever, now they have to look for
communications they know are being hidden within things, like pictures on
computer screens," says Bamford. "And even once they do that, then
they still have to break whatever it is, the encryption that might be used
to hide the actual message."
So, who is winning this "code war"? "The advantage is always
going to be in favor of the code-makers, because the code-breakers are going
to have to have computers far faster and far more powerful in order to break
the encryption systems made by the code-makers," says Bamford. "[The
code-breakers are] trying very hard, but the question is whether the technological
capability and the analytical capability is enough to give them the head start
above the terrorists."
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