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The Soon Coming Judgment Of God Upon America and How To Escape It 61
The National Security Agency
“The NSA is the largest, most secretive and most powerful intelligence agency in the
world. With a staff of thirty-eight thousand people, it dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower, and
influence.”
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The NSA primary purpose is to intercept communications around the globe, sort
them by computer, and to break codes. The main headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland is
composed of more than 1.9 million square feet of office space (equivalent to over 43.5 acres of
office space) and according to an NSA official, it has an estimated 10 acres of computers.
Overall the NSA has “more than sixty buildings: offices, warehouses, factories, laboratories, and
living quarters.”
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The NSA's computers are not your run of the mill computers. They are constantly
updating their systems to insure that they have the fastest system in the world. In 1976 they
purchased a Cray-1 super computer, in 1983 the Cray X-MP (5 times faster than the Cray-1), in
1985 the Cray-2 (60 times faster than the Cray-1), in 1988 they purchase a Cray Y-MP (100 to
200 times faster than the Cray-1), in 1991 a Connection Machine CM-5 was installed (1,625
times faster than the Cray-1), in 1993 the CM-5 was modified and its speed was doubled, in 1999
a IBM RS/6000 SP was installed,
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in 2002 the NSA took delivery of a Cray X1.
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The X1 is
5,000 times faster than the Cray-1 and is capable of one trillion calculations per second (1
teraflop).
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This tremendous computer speed is used to crack intelligence codes of the nations
around the world and to produce codes that can't be cracked by them.
Much more than breaking codes, the NSA is involved in intercepting, gathering,
analyzing, and storing of electronic communications. The intercepting of electronic intelligence
is called “Sigint” (short for signals intelligence). Sigint includes the detection and interception of
all forms of electronic communication including: radio, telephone, cellphone, microwave, radar,
telemetry, and data transmissions including: faxes, e-mails, Internet and other data transfers.
Each day in Russia the “NSA attempts to collect all Soviet transmissions—the full daily
broadcast of every conventional radio station in all the Soviet republics, every transmission to
every Soviet embassy abroad, every broadcast to a ship at sea, every transmission by military
units on maneuvers in Eastern Europe, the radio traffic of control tower at Soviet air-ports, the
radar signature of every Soviet system.”
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In order to accomplish its Sigint gathering, the NSA employs NRO satellites in the skies,
and a worldwide network of land based signal interception posts. The land based network
includes a joint effort between the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Great
Britain that allows each of these countries to listen intercept the communications of their own
citizens.
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It is believed that the NSA's total global network “has the capability of intercepting all
the world’s communications at any given time.”
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This global network is commonly called
Echelon.
The Echelon network is composed of powerful computers programed to sort and filter the
communications using voice recognition and by searching for any of many different code words
or phrases in each communication. The process is known as optical character recognition (OCR)
and each US intelligence agency has its own OCR dictionary or watchlist. The dictionaries are
updated regularly.
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“According to William Studeman, former NSA director, during a typical
half hour, a million intercepted messages are passed on to Echelon computers. The OCR
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