Comment Visiting the NSA (Score 5) 442
Gary, care to expand on your visit to the NSA? Here's my story:
In '95, I visited the NSA and the National Cryptographic Museum (adjacent to the NSA headquarters). I didn't make it past the barb-wire fence at the NSA, but I did encounter a few spooks.
The front gate was unattended, so I drove right in and parked as close to the big black monolith of a building as I could. My friend and I began to make silly poses and take lots of pictures, joking that we probably weren't the only ones taking photos of us. A man in a white shirt and black tie (think Michael Douglas in Falling Down) approaches us: "Are you lost?" Without waiting for an answer, he briskly walks away. We jump in the car and head to the museum.
A group of Marines were on some sort of field trip to the museum. As they exited, an officer was giving them coffee cups with the NSA seal on them. Wearing my "Clipper Chip Inside" t-shirt, I approached him and asked how I might get one. After a few minutes of "you punks don't know the reasons the world needs the Clipper Chip...to tell you would be a breach of national security," he agreed to sell me one for $8 cash.
So, no real MIB-types. But there's certainly a spook mentality around that place.
In '95, I visited the NSA and the National Cryptographic Museum (adjacent to the NSA headquarters). I didn't make it past the barb-wire fence at the NSA, but I did encounter a few spooks.
The front gate was unattended, so I drove right in and parked as close to the big black monolith of a building as I could. My friend and I began to make silly poses and take lots of pictures, joking that we probably weren't the only ones taking photos of us. A man in a white shirt and black tie (think Michael Douglas in Falling Down) approaches us: "Are you lost?" Without waiting for an answer, he briskly walks away. We jump in the car and head to the museum.
A group of Marines were on some sort of field trip to the museum. As they exited, an officer was giving them coffee cups with the NSA seal on them. Wearing my "Clipper Chip Inside" t-shirt, I approached him and asked how I might get one. After a few minutes of "you punks don't know the reasons the world needs the Clipper Chip...to tell you would be a breach of national security," he agreed to sell me one for $8 cash.
So, no real MIB-types. But there's certainly a spook mentality around that place.
