tangent4ronpaul
06-22-2010, 03:55 AM
It’s an agency staffed by some of the government’s top hackers, brainiest cryptographers, and most sophisticated network defenders. But when employees at the NSA aren’t playing Big Brother, pwning foreign networks or coming to the aid of hacked companies, it turns out they’re (surprise!) up to some exceptionally geeky business in their spare time.
Government Attic has a collection of documents, finally obtained two years after the organization filed a Freedom of Information Request, that detail the super-secret spy agency’s various extracurricular activities. The 64-page release describes, mostly in newsletters and group announcements, the goings-on of 12 different “Learned Organizations” formed by NSA staff members.
Most of the clubs revolve around cryptoanalysis, communications analysis and language translation. Which is pretty much what employees at the NSA do from 9 to 5 — and, it seems, still shell out $15 in annual fees to do on evenings and weekends, too.
But at least on evenings and weekends, snacks are involved. Members of the Crypto-Linguistics Association (CLA), a club that’s devoted to “engag[ing] its members in language-related activities,” also have a flair for fine global cuisine. The documents include a photo of the “CLA International Cookbook: A Collection of International Delights,” which must boast some 5-star recipes: it was classified as “top secret” until Government Attic’s 2008 request.
In their Tales from the KRYPT newsletter, one member of the KRYPTOS Society (“established in 1981 to promote interest in cryptoanalysis”) offers a summary of the group’s annual awards luncheon, held at Ft. Meade’s “Club Meade,” where prizes were doled out to winners of the annual KRYPTOS Literature Contest (top prize went to: “Fast Identification of Particular Features in a Specific Application Generated by a Particular Algorithm”).
And then there’s the Crypto-Mathematics Institute (CMI), which seems kinda like the more exclusive version of KRYPTOS. The club’s manifesto includes six pages on entry-application requirements and the complex process of electing the club’s president, president-elect and executive director. They’ve also got a serious thing for word puzzles, with a fun nine-page test (some of which, they confess, was cribbed from the “Kryptos Kristmas Kwiz”) that includes such brain-busters as “Although it might ‘pain’ you to hear it, HEADACHE cannot follow. What word could follow and why?”
Uptight, sure, but CMI’s not above a good party. The group’s newsletter advertises a June tea social and a movie night, and it hawks 50th Anniversary Commemorative Puzzle Books. (“It will take another fifty years for you to solve these puzzles. So get to it!”) And like any club worth its membership dues, they’ve also got T-shirts. (“Short-sleeved and breezy cotton. Just right for the outdoor season. Be the envy of Princeton and La Jolla.”)
For the NSA’s artistic types, the Pen & Cursor Society (P&CS) sponsors “creativity seminars,” where members are invited to “explore childhood memories,” “break rules!” and “fertilize the garden in which you grow ideas.” And ideas seem welcome among P&CS members — the group’s newsletter includes a feisty editorial, “Combo-Words: When Will They End?” deriding terms like “Eurotrash, psychobabble [and] infotainment” that “permanently sully any words beginning with the same forms.”
Alas, Wired nerds need not apply. The clubs are all restricted to NSA staffers, although the agency opted to protect the geeky parties, by omitting club member names and club websites throughout the documents. “Certain information … has been deleted from the enclosures,” the NSA’s letter to Government Attic reads, “[where] its disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security.”
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/nsa-gets-geeky-after-dark-new-docs-show/#ixzz0rZfVFYZZ
Government Attic has a collection of documents, finally obtained two years after the organization filed a Freedom of Information Request, that detail the super-secret spy agency’s various extracurricular activities. The 64-page release describes, mostly in newsletters and group announcements, the goings-on of 12 different “Learned Organizations” formed by NSA staff members.
Most of the clubs revolve around cryptoanalysis, communications analysis and language translation. Which is pretty much what employees at the NSA do from 9 to 5 — and, it seems, still shell out $15 in annual fees to do on evenings and weekends, too.
But at least on evenings and weekends, snacks are involved. Members of the Crypto-Linguistics Association (CLA), a club that’s devoted to “engag[ing] its members in language-related activities,” also have a flair for fine global cuisine. The documents include a photo of the “CLA International Cookbook: A Collection of International Delights,” which must boast some 5-star recipes: it was classified as “top secret” until Government Attic’s 2008 request.
In their Tales from the KRYPT newsletter, one member of the KRYPTOS Society (“established in 1981 to promote interest in cryptoanalysis”) offers a summary of the group’s annual awards luncheon, held at Ft. Meade’s “Club Meade,” where prizes were doled out to winners of the annual KRYPTOS Literature Contest (top prize went to: “Fast Identification of Particular Features in a Specific Application Generated by a Particular Algorithm”).
And then there’s the Crypto-Mathematics Institute (CMI), which seems kinda like the more exclusive version of KRYPTOS. The club’s manifesto includes six pages on entry-application requirements and the complex process of electing the club’s president, president-elect and executive director. They’ve also got a serious thing for word puzzles, with a fun nine-page test (some of which, they confess, was cribbed from the “Kryptos Kristmas Kwiz”) that includes such brain-busters as “Although it might ‘pain’ you to hear it, HEADACHE cannot follow. What word could follow and why?”
Uptight, sure, but CMI’s not above a good party. The group’s newsletter advertises a June tea social and a movie night, and it hawks 50th Anniversary Commemorative Puzzle Books. (“It will take another fifty years for you to solve these puzzles. So get to it!”) And like any club worth its membership dues, they’ve also got T-shirts. (“Short-sleeved and breezy cotton. Just right for the outdoor season. Be the envy of Princeton and La Jolla.”)
For the NSA’s artistic types, the Pen & Cursor Society (P&CS) sponsors “creativity seminars,” where members are invited to “explore childhood memories,” “break rules!” and “fertilize the garden in which you grow ideas.” And ideas seem welcome among P&CS members — the group’s newsletter includes a feisty editorial, “Combo-Words: When Will They End?” deriding terms like “Eurotrash, psychobabble [and] infotainment” that “permanently sully any words beginning with the same forms.”
Alas, Wired nerds need not apply. The clubs are all restricted to NSA staffers, although the agency opted to protect the geeky parties, by omitting club member names and club websites throughout the documents. “Certain information … has been deleted from the enclosures,” the NSA’s letter to Government Attic reads, “[where] its disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security.”
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/nsa-gets-geeky-after-dark-new-docs-show/#ixzz0rZfVFYZZ