Submission + - Book Review
An anonymous reader writes: Book Review
Coded Messages: How the CIA and NSA Hoodwink Congress and The People
Author: Nelson McAvoy
Pages: 173 plus appendicies
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Rating: 9/10
Reviewer: Anonymous
ISBN: 978-0-87586-814-1
Summary: A math and physics geek, who was present at the founding of
the NSA, an NSA spy, a member of the MIT faculty and NASA's Director
of Space-Based Laser Communications, explains cryptography throughout
recent centuries, how Phil Zimmerman changed the fundamental mission
of the NSA, and why that means the NSA now should be subject to
Congressional oversight.
One October afternoon in 2009, I was on a long-distance bicycle trip
along a surprisingly-flat route through West Virginia, loaded with
panniers, tent, and sleeping bag, when a car pulled ahead, slowed
down, and a hand from the window waved me to a stop. Thus began my
introduction to Nelson McAvoy, an 80-something fellow long-distance
cyclist, athletically dressed and with a whistle, on his way to
referree a kids' soccer game.
It took only minutes to learn that Nelson had written well-known books
about teaching soccer to youth, had been an NSA spy and had worked
for MIT and for NASA. Nelson had to referree the soccer game, so we
exchanged phone numbers and I rode to the next town, 35 miles
away. Nelson met me for breakfast.
We talked all day. Nelson was happy to converse with someone who knew
the basics of RSA public key cryptography, had heard of Phil
Zimmerman, PGP, and Phil's legal saga, who could at least participate
in a conversation about masers, the hydrogen line, and the NSA's need
for low-power amplifiers at 1.42GHz to intercept MiG in-flight
communications, and who was interested in what it was like as a
Westerner to bicycle through Eastern Germany the day the Berlin Wall
came down. I was delighted that my bicycle trip had enabled me to
spend the day with someone with such common interests and interesting
tales.
I drew him out, pulling different parts of his story from him.
"Nelson, how did you become interested in soccer?" "It was part of my
NSA spy training. If you're going to claim to be from any part of the
world other than the United States, when someone rolls a ball toward
you, you better know what to do with your feet." "What did you work on
at NASA?" "Spaced-based laser communications, bouncing lasers from the
ground, then from satellite to satellite and finally back to the
ground. When it became clear that fiber optics was a better solution,
I decided it was time to retire." The following spring, Nelson sent
me the draft of his book, Coded Messages. The book covers almost
exactly the topics of my conversation with Nelson that previous
October.
The book is written in a most personable way, a story written by a man
who, as a kid from a backwater part of West Virginia, became a
mathematician and went on to live as a spy. There are stories of wars
and generals, specifics of secret codes, surprise attacks,
infiltration, social engineering, and mathematical insights, all
peppered with personal stories of daring acts by those both within and
outside of governments, told by an insider who lived through the
events during and after the Korean War.
In the book's preface, Nelson states that, to his knowledge, no
current or former NSA employee has written a book about their
activities. From the Korean war, through Viet Nam, the Bay of Pigs,
the Cuban Missle Crisis, and through the invasion of Afghanistan,
Nelson has never seen an NSA employee interviewed, nor has he known of
one to be subpoenaed, by the Senate or Congress. Even after Mark Klein
revealed, in 2006, that AT&T allowed the NSA to splice into all of
AT&T's fiber optic cables in Los Angeles, NSA employees were not
interviewed. On the contrary, Congress retroactively immunized those
involved. Nelson contrasts that with the CIA, whose employees have
been supooenaed and interviewed by the thousands. This difference in
exposure and perception, Nelson states, was planned from the
beginnings of the NSA. Nelson says the story could not have been told
until 1997 and the book reveals why. As far as he knows, no one else
is around to tell the story and he would not like it to be lost to
history.
Nelson reveals the myth that the CIA is an intelligence agency and
that the NSA's main job is communication's intelligence. Not so: the
CIA is a clandestine army, provocateurs. The NSA is the agency that
gathers intelligence, both COMINT and HUMINT, has a budget larger,
although classified, than the CIA and the FBI combined, and is
virtually unsupervised by Congress. It was designed that way from the
beginning.
Nelson was at the meeting where the NSA was formed. The CIA was
established to take action that changes situations directly,
e.g. arming Afghanistan rebels as in "Charlie's War". The rebels were
not armed, nor was the Bay of Pigs invaded, in order to get
information. Calling the CIA an intelligence agency was a ruse,
allowing Congressional oversight of one agency, while leaving the real
intelligence-gathering agency, the NSA, free from such oversight. It
was recognized that this was unconstitutional but, Nelson says, it was
absolutely necessary due to the state of the art of cryptography at
the time. In other words, for mathematical reasons.
Coded Messages explains in great detail, with worked examples, the
history of cryptography, from the symmetric codes of the US Civil War
through World War II through to today's public key cryptography.
There is the story of Anson Stager, a 21-year-old telegrapher who
eventually devised a Civil War code never broken by the Confederacy. A
complete, worked example of that code is given in the book. Social
engineering was as much a problem then as it is now. General Grant
forced a cryptographer, under threat of military punishment, to share
the cipher. The full text of several telegram exchanges, given in the
book, reveals the War Department's outrage and General Grant's
extensive apologies and policy revisions because of that chastisement.
Even more pages are devoted to the Japanese symmetric code, JN-25,
used in World War II. Nelson discusses names, personalities and habits
of the team of cryptanalysts who hacked the Japanese code, along with
the associated battle plans.. Nelson learned much of this during his
time at Arlington Hall Station, when old timers would tell stories
they probably should not have told. Again, a fully-worked example of
the JN-25 code is given, including the katakana.
The stories about the cryptanalysts are at least as interesting as the
code itself. For example, Agnes Driscoll (nee Meyer), born in 1889,
was a math and physics major who cursed like a sailor and was the
Navy's Director of Naval Communications for the Code and Signal
division. Former members of the language school at Tokyo included
Eddie Layton, a personal friend of Admiral Yamamoto. Tommy Finnegan
used an early IBM computer. The coming Japanese attack on Midway was
confirmed by a social engineering attack, conceived by Lieutenant
W. Jasper Holmes, a University of Hawaii professor of engineering,
that caused the Japanese to send traffic that the US subsequently
decrypted.
Nelson shows how absolute secrecy was essential for those efforts.
Quiet, unnoticed human intelligence gathering played an important
role. If the enemy had any inkling that their codes were compromised,
they simply would have changed the addititive pages to their symmetric
ciphers and the US would have been back at square one. The secrecy
saved lives. Those lessons were learned during World War II and led to
the consolidation of separate intelligence agencies into the NSA.
Nelson describes how he came to be at the meeting where the NSA was
formed. He reviews his childhood in West Virginia, where, before he
learned to read, he built ham radios and built a rhombic antenna to
listen to the New York Metropolitan Opera, He discusses his time in
college in West Virginia. After being drafted, Nelson asked to be
allowed to design microwave antennas in lieu of more mundane
assignments. That led to his assignment to Arlington Hall Station,
where he proposed a radio direction finding study to enable more
accurate triangulation of enemy transmitters. It was in this role,
brought along to answer technical questions, that Neil Ganzert
included Nelson in a meeting, with General Harry Reicheldorfer, at
which representatives from Arlington Hall Station, the Army Security
Agency, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House were present.
The NSA had been established by President Truman with the stroke of a
pen. Under Eisenhower, the NSA was to have a permanent cadre of
operations, consolidating COMINT, communications intelligence, with
HUMINT, human intelligence. In order to infiltrate in order to break
symmetric ciphers, a group was needed for every major potential
foe. Each group would know the language, the culture, everything they
could learn about each entity of interest. That was the NSA, ten
thousand strong, highly educated, who throughout their lives couldn't
tell their spouses what they did at work. And so they socialized
together and avoided outsiders. There were clubs for every recreation,
with meetings held in every language, a vast array of unbelievable
variety, populated by US citizens whose job it was to know the world,
brought together to be able to understand every culture. Utmost
secrecy was necessary to save lives. They were obvious choices for
infiltration.
All of that changed on Friday, January 12, 1996 at 23:37:22, Pacific
Standard Time, when the US Attorney General declined to prosecute Phil
Zimmerman for exporting a terrorist weapon, the source code for Pretty
Good Privacy (PGP). Code breaking became a thing of the past.
Nelson gives a good review of the mathematics behind Diffie-Hellman
key exchange and RSA public key cryptography. The book explains, for
the educated lay person, the mathematics behind public key
cryptography and shows why even the NSA cannot break sufficiently
large public keys. Nelson tells Marty Hellman's story, from his Jewish
childhood in a Catholic Bronx neighborhood through his meeting, and
subsequent collaboration, with Whitfield Diffie. That was followed by
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman's 1978 paper, which made public key
cryptosystems a reality. Inside the Fort George Meade intelligence
bastion, the top echelon was in denial and the rank-and-file took a
month or so to figure out the implications. Phil Zimmerman was
fascinated and began to develop source code to implement the RSA
algorithm in hopes of commercializing the program. Charles Merritt
began a parallel effort, only later learning about Phil's work and
beginning a collaboration with him that later was hampered by RSA
patents. Joe Biden, in 1991, introduced a Congressional bill that
would have forced a government back door in any crypto system. In
advance of the passage of that bill, Merritt began uploading PGP's
source to US bulletin boards, thus getting ahead of the
as-yet-unpassed law and avoiding RSA patent licensing.
This began a multi-year ordeal for Zimmerman, ending in 1996 with the
US's decision not to prosecute. In the meantime, PGP had become
available worldwide. Public key cryptography was available to the
public and it since has been used by organizations from Amnesty
International to witness protection organizations in the Balkins. That
public key cryptography is available to anyone is the reason we have
https, the secure connections needed for shopping online.
Public key cryptography also is used by nations and governments, which
leads to the conclusion that symmetric ciphers are a thing of the past
and that the primary reason for keeping the NSA out of the view of
Congressional oversight has disappeared. The NSA is out of the code
breaking business. The NSA has transformed, Nelson says, from a
code-breaking organization into a traffic analysis one. Where, before,
only employees were used at the NSA, today the traffic surveillance is
done primarily by contractors.
Nelson lays out the case that the need for absolute secrecy within the
NSA is no more and that it is time for Congressional oversight. Given
the near-constant rate of stories about increased surveillance and
consolidated intelligence databases since 9/11, Nelson's thesis
provides a timely and important impetus for public discussion.
Alongside that, with its historical perspective, war stories and
insights into mathematical personalities hard at work saving lives,
Coded Messages: How the CIA and NSA Hoodwink Congress and The People
is a pretty good read.
Coded Messages: How the CIA and NSA Hoodwink Congress and The People
Author: Nelson McAvoy
Pages: 173 plus appendicies
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Rating: 9/10
Reviewer: Anonymous
ISBN: 978-0-87586-814-1
Summary: A math and physics geek, who was present at the founding of
the NSA, an NSA spy, a member of the MIT faculty and NASA's Director
of Space-Based Laser Communications, explains cryptography throughout
recent centuries, how Phil Zimmerman changed the fundamental mission
of the NSA, and why that means the NSA now should be subject to
Congressional oversight.
One October afternoon in 2009, I was on a long-distance bicycle trip
along a surprisingly-flat route through West Virginia, loaded with
panniers, tent, and sleeping bag, when a car pulled ahead, slowed
down, and a hand from the window waved me to a stop. Thus began my
introduction to Nelson McAvoy, an 80-something fellow long-distance
cyclist, athletically dressed and with a whistle, on his way to
referree a kids' soccer game.
It took only minutes to learn that Nelson had written well-known books
about teaching soccer to youth, had been an NSA spy and had worked
for MIT and for NASA. Nelson had to referree the soccer game, so we
exchanged phone numbers and I rode to the next town, 35 miles
away. Nelson met me for breakfast.
We talked all day. Nelson was happy to converse with someone who knew
the basics of RSA public key cryptography, had heard of Phil
Zimmerman, PGP, and Phil's legal saga, who could at least participate
in a conversation about masers, the hydrogen line, and the NSA's need
for low-power amplifiers at 1.42GHz to intercept MiG in-flight
communications, and who was interested in what it was like as a
Westerner to bicycle through Eastern Germany the day the Berlin Wall
came down. I was delighted that my bicycle trip had enabled me to
spend the day with someone with such common interests and interesting
tales.
I drew him out, pulling different parts of his story from him.
"Nelson, how did you become interested in soccer?" "It was part of my
NSA spy training. If you're going to claim to be from any part of the
world other than the United States, when someone rolls a ball toward
you, you better know what to do with your feet." "What did you work on
at NASA?" "Spaced-based laser communications, bouncing lasers from the
ground, then from satellite to satellite and finally back to the
ground. When it became clear that fiber optics was a better solution,
I decided it was time to retire." The following spring, Nelson sent
me the draft of his book, Coded Messages. The book covers almost
exactly the topics of my conversation with Nelson that previous
October.
The book is written in a most personable way, a story written by a man
who, as a kid from a backwater part of West Virginia, became a
mathematician and went on to live as a spy. There are stories of wars
and generals, specifics of secret codes, surprise attacks,
infiltration, social engineering, and mathematical insights, all
peppered with personal stories of daring acts by those both within and
outside of governments, told by an insider who lived through the
events during and after the Korean War.
In the book's preface, Nelson states that, to his knowledge, no
current or former NSA employee has written a book about their
activities. From the Korean war, through Viet Nam, the Bay of Pigs,
the Cuban Missle Crisis, and through the invasion of Afghanistan,
Nelson has never seen an NSA employee interviewed, nor has he known of
one to be subpoenaed, by the Senate or Congress. Even after Mark Klein
revealed, in 2006, that AT&T allowed the NSA to splice into all of
AT&T's fiber optic cables in Los Angeles, NSA employees were not
interviewed. On the contrary, Congress retroactively immunized those
involved. Nelson contrasts that with the CIA, whose employees have
been supooenaed and interviewed by the thousands. This difference in
exposure and perception, Nelson states, was planned from the
beginnings of the NSA. Nelson says the story could not have been told
until 1997 and the book reveals why. As far as he knows, no one else
is around to tell the story and he would not like it to be lost to
history.
Nelson reveals the myth that the CIA is an intelligence agency and
that the NSA's main job is communication's intelligence. Not so: the
CIA is a clandestine army, provocateurs. The NSA is the agency that
gathers intelligence, both COMINT and HUMINT, has a budget larger,
although classified, than the CIA and the FBI combined, and is
virtually unsupervised by Congress. It was designed that way from the
beginning.
Nelson was at the meeting where the NSA was formed. The CIA was
established to take action that changes situations directly,
e.g. arming Afghanistan rebels as in "Charlie's War". The rebels were
not armed, nor was the Bay of Pigs invaded, in order to get
information. Calling the CIA an intelligence agency was a ruse,
allowing Congressional oversight of one agency, while leaving the real
intelligence-gathering agency, the NSA, free from such oversight. It
was recognized that this was unconstitutional but, Nelson says, it was
absolutely necessary due to the state of the art of cryptography at
the time. In other words, for mathematical reasons.
Coded Messages explains in great detail, with worked examples, the
history of cryptography, from the symmetric codes of the US Civil War
through World War II through to today's public key cryptography.
There is the story of Anson Stager, a 21-year-old telegrapher who
eventually devised a Civil War code never broken by the Confederacy. A
complete, worked example of that code is given in the book. Social
engineering was as much a problem then as it is now. General Grant
forced a cryptographer, under threat of military punishment, to share
the cipher. The full text of several telegram exchanges, given in the
book, reveals the War Department's outrage and General Grant's
extensive apologies and policy revisions because of that chastisement.
Even more pages are devoted to the Japanese symmetric code, JN-25,
used in World War II. Nelson discusses names, personalities and habits
of the team of cryptanalysts who hacked the Japanese code, along with
the associated battle plans.. Nelson learned much of this during his
time at Arlington Hall Station, when old timers would tell stories
they probably should not have told. Again, a fully-worked example of
the JN-25 code is given, including the katakana.
The stories about the cryptanalysts are at least as interesting as the
code itself. For example, Agnes Driscoll (nee Meyer), born in 1889,
was a math and physics major who cursed like a sailor and was the
Navy's Director of Naval Communications for the Code and Signal
division. Former members of the language school at Tokyo included
Eddie Layton, a personal friend of Admiral Yamamoto. Tommy Finnegan
used an early IBM computer. The coming Japanese attack on Midway was
confirmed by a social engineering attack, conceived by Lieutenant
W. Jasper Holmes, a University of Hawaii professor of engineering,
that caused the Japanese to send traffic that the US subsequently
decrypted.
Nelson shows how absolute secrecy was essential for those efforts.
Quiet, unnoticed human intelligence gathering played an important
role. If the enemy had any inkling that their codes were compromised,
they simply would have changed the addititive pages to their symmetric
ciphers and the US would have been back at square one. The secrecy
saved lives. Those lessons were learned during World War II and led to
the consolidation of separate intelligence agencies into the NSA.
Nelson describes how he came to be at the meeting where the NSA was
formed. He reviews his childhood in West Virginia, where, before he
learned to read, he built ham radios and built a rhombic antenna to
listen to the New York Metropolitan Opera, He discusses his time in
college in West Virginia. After being drafted, Nelson asked to be
allowed to design microwave antennas in lieu of more mundane
assignments. That led to his assignment to Arlington Hall Station,
where he proposed a radio direction finding study to enable more
accurate triangulation of enemy transmitters. It was in this role,
brought along to answer technical questions, that Neil Ganzert
included Nelson in a meeting, with General Harry Reicheldorfer, at
which representatives from Arlington Hall Station, the Army Security
Agency, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House were present.
The NSA had been established by President Truman with the stroke of a
pen. Under Eisenhower, the NSA was to have a permanent cadre of
operations, consolidating COMINT, communications intelligence, with
HUMINT, human intelligence. In order to infiltrate in order to break
symmetric ciphers, a group was needed for every major potential
foe. Each group would know the language, the culture, everything they
could learn about each entity of interest. That was the NSA, ten
thousand strong, highly educated, who throughout their lives couldn't
tell their spouses what they did at work. And so they socialized
together and avoided outsiders. There were clubs for every recreation,
with meetings held in every language, a vast array of unbelievable
variety, populated by US citizens whose job it was to know the world,
brought together to be able to understand every culture. Utmost
secrecy was necessary to save lives. They were obvious choices for
infiltration.
All of that changed on Friday, January 12, 1996 at 23:37:22, Pacific
Standard Time, when the US Attorney General declined to prosecute Phil
Zimmerman for exporting a terrorist weapon, the source code for Pretty
Good Privacy (PGP). Code breaking became a thing of the past.
Nelson gives a good review of the mathematics behind Diffie-Hellman
key exchange and RSA public key cryptography. The book explains, for
the educated lay person, the mathematics behind public key
cryptography and shows why even the NSA cannot break sufficiently
large public keys. Nelson tells Marty Hellman's story, from his Jewish
childhood in a Catholic Bronx neighborhood through his meeting, and
subsequent collaboration, with Whitfield Diffie. That was followed by
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman's 1978 paper, which made public key
cryptosystems a reality. Inside the Fort George Meade intelligence
bastion, the top echelon was in denial and the rank-and-file took a
month or so to figure out the implications. Phil Zimmerman was
fascinated and began to develop source code to implement the RSA
algorithm in hopes of commercializing the program. Charles Merritt
began a parallel effort, only later learning about Phil's work and
beginning a collaboration with him that later was hampered by RSA
patents. Joe Biden, in 1991, introduced a Congressional bill that
would have forced a government back door in any crypto system. In
advance of the passage of that bill, Merritt began uploading PGP's
source to US bulletin boards, thus getting ahead of the
as-yet-unpassed law and avoiding RSA patent licensing.
This began a multi-year ordeal for Zimmerman, ending in 1996 with the
US's decision not to prosecute. In the meantime, PGP had become
available worldwide. Public key cryptography was available to the
public and it since has been used by organizations from Amnesty
International to witness protection organizations in the Balkins. That
public key cryptography is available to anyone is the reason we have
https, the secure connections needed for shopping online.
Public key cryptography also is used by nations and governments, which
leads to the conclusion that symmetric ciphers are a thing of the past
and that the primary reason for keeping the NSA out of the view of
Congressional oversight has disappeared. The NSA is out of the code
breaking business. The NSA has transformed, Nelson says, from a
code-breaking organization into a traffic analysis one. Where, before,
only employees were used at the NSA, today the traffic surveillance is
done primarily by contractors.
Nelson lays out the case that the need for absolute secrecy within the
NSA is no more and that it is time for Congressional oversight. Given
the near-constant rate of stories about increased surveillance and
consolidated intelligence databases since 9/11, Nelson's thesis
provides a timely and important impetus for public discussion.
Alongside that, with its historical perspective, war stories and
insights into mathematical personalities hard at work saving lives,
Coded Messages: How the CIA and NSA Hoodwink Congress and The People
is a pretty good read.
