Talk:National Security Agency

General commentary

This is a challenging article to write, in a different way than the CIA article. In some respects, NSA is easier than CIA, because it has been far less involved in policy and political issues. In other respects, it needs more coverage on its technical contributions. Like CIA, a certain amount of timeline is appropriate, although I'm not yet sure that its operational histories need subarticles.

While a good deal of the material here is a braindump from personal experience, there's also some cut, paste, and, I hope, merciless editing of material from some SIGINT history articles I have on other pages. There needs to be just the right amount of linking to technical areas such as communications intelligence and cryptography, with a brief note of explanation.

Definitely a work in progress. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:15, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

General need for work

Other things having gotten higher priority, I never finished cleaning out material here that is also in the series "Signals intelligence in (date period)". Even with some of those articles, they got far too large and I was able to split others, but some are still too big for easy maintenance. Those articles, incidentally, are by no means limited to NSA.

The intent here was to talk about the U.S. agency, its mission, its oversight and lack of oversight (or taking direct orders without checks and balances), and its technical approach. Its history and development, role vis-a-vis the rest of the United States intelligence community, and policy control are relevant, as well as more the technical base that make some of its capabilities. There are valuable lessons from some of their spy scandals, as they have had a very different internal security culture than CIA, with different results.

Their role in INFOSEC is relatively little known, with the public attention going to SIGINT. Things like the move to more open crypto development, for example, are noteworthy in the study of bureaucracies. Howard C. Berkowitz 14:09, 25 October 2008 (UTC)