The NSA Draws Fire

[R. A. Hettinga]

http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,322587,00.html


Saturday, Jul. 20, 2002
The NSA Draws Fire
A scathing House report charges the agency is badly mismanaged
BY DOUGLAS WALLER

The FBI and the CIA have come under plenty of fire for their failure to
prevent 9/11. Now, it seems, it?s the turn of the National Security Agency
(NSA). The agency, whose job is to protect U.S. government information and
ferret out foreign secrets, has already drawn criticism for being slow to
analyze two cryptic messages it intercepted last Sept. 10, warning that
something big was going to happen the next day. Now a scathing report
issued by the House Intelligence Committee has concluded that the agency is
badly mismanaged - congressional sources tell TIME - which resulted in its
failing "to provide tactical and strategic warning" of Sept. 11.

The intelligence panel's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security,
which released an unclassified summary of its report last week, found that
the NSA is "unable to identify" how it spends the money it gets from
Congress each year "to any level of detail." A number of its projects
duplicate one another, the report said. And while the NSA had listened in
on "large volumes of phone calls from the part of the world [where]
al-Qaeda was located," says Representative Saxby Chambliss, who chairs the
terrorism subcommittee, "the problem was, they didn't focus on al-Qaeda,"
so that those messages could be identified and processed quickly.

Another problem is that the cash-strapped agency, which spent billions on
cold war?era satellites, hired no new employees for "an extended period of
time" before Sept. 11. That was a big mistake, the subcommittee believes,
because the NSA was already chronically short of computer scientists,
engineers and foreign-language experts. The NSA even established incentive
programs to entice more employees to take early retirement. What's worse,
the agency's overworked linguists and analysts were allowed to continue
taking advantage of the early-retirement program - even after Sept. 11.

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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