The time of troubles: The US national security agency in the twenty‐first century

Abstract

This article seeks to ask whether the US National Security Agency (NSA) doing its job or stumbling through a midlife crisis. It reviews what has occurred at NSA during the last decade. It argues that some statements that have appeared in the American press that NSA was solely responsible for some of the US intelligence community's recent intelligence failures are factually incorrect. Furthermore, NSA's Sigint collection capabilities have actually improved considerably during the last decade, and evidence suggests that the technological obstacles that have been often cited in press reports as contributing to NSA's current problems have not yet begun to be widely used outside of the developed countries in Western Europe and East Asia. NSA's most pressing problem is, instead, an area which unfortunately has received little public attention in recent months, specifically the deterioration of the Agency's Sigint processing, analysis and reporting capabilities. It is clear that NSA must recruit substantial numbers of analysts and information technology specialists in the near future, and invest money in acquiring new processing technologies in order to begin to address this problem. The Agency must also take immediate steps to shore up its strained relations with its customers inside the US government and the armed forces. Given the transient and oftentimes fickle nature of politics, NSA must realize that it cannot depend solely on a few allies in the US Congress for its continued survival. Equally important, but more difficult, will be NSA's internal management problems, such as how to trim the Agency's large bureaucracy, eliminate duplication of effort and how to put NSA's financial accounts in order. Finally, it is time that NSA adopts a policy of greater openness about what it does and how it does it. One obvious way to do this is to declassify documents which detail the Agency's significant accomplishments since the end of World War II.