Known as the "super-secret" American spycraft agency, the National Security Agency has found itself increasingly in the headlines in recent months, with its critics and the media voicing their concern that too little is known of the agency's operations-and its accountability.

Ripples of concern swept Europe and the U.S. in February, when the European Parliament released journalist Duncan Campbell's special report that the NSA was intercepting "billions of messages" per hour around the globe-from users of cell phones, radio transmitters, the Internet, fax machines and other electronic communications. The level of interception of private messages "is getting out of control," Campbell told the Parliament's Committee for Justice and Home Affairs. The report also alleged that the NSA may be intercepting commercial secrets and providing them to American corporations.

The surveillance project, reportedly code-named "Echelon" is a joint effort of the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The largest of nine known NSA interception sites around the globe is NSA's complex at Menwith Hill, on the North Yorkshire moors in England. Located there are more than two-dozen radomes-the BBC called them "giant golf balls"-that receive signals via satellite.

Transmissions received from these worldwide sources are processed using keyword searches by supercomputers, filtering out messages that may indicate terrorist, international organized crime, drug trafficking, or hostile foreign government activity that may threaten the national security of the U.S. and participating nations.

Media reports on Echelon immediately seized on the capabilities of the NSA-led system to intercept private messages from innocent parties. The Associated Press quoted a former Menwith Hill technician as hearing the voice of Sen. Strom Thurmond in an intercepted message. And a former Canadian intelligence officer told CBS' 60 Minutes that a woman's name and telephone number were placed into the Echelon database after she told a friend on the phone that her son "had bombed in a school play."

Both the European Parliament and Congress are looking into the Echelon issue. In a rare congressional public hearing on NSA practice in mid-April, Director Michael V. Hayden said the agency is not eavesdropping on private communications from ordinary Americans, either home or abroad. "We are not out there as a vacuum cleaner," said Hayden, who also is a lieutenant general in the U.S. Air Force. Nor, he said, does the NSA engage in industrial espionage on behalf of U.S. companies. "There are absolutely clear rules. They are well known. And they are well respected," Hayden told the House Intelligence Committee. U.S. law prohibits the agency from performing surveillance on U.S. private citizens, with few exceptions (such as espionage and treason). The NSA director told the committee that when private messages are inadvertently received, they are usually destroyed.

And while the NSA hasn't acknowledged the existence of the Echelon, there's no question that both critics and supporters of the agency agree that it's real, by whatever name.

Revelations of such an electronic surveillance network shouldn't be a surprise, given the historic advances in telecommunications, computer processing power, and other modern technology capabilities over the last two decades. The collection, interpretation, and distribution of national security intelligence is, after all, the agency's mission.

Formed in 1952 by President Harry Truman as a separately organized agency within the Department of Defense, the NSA is believed to be the largest intelligence agency in the world, with some 38,000 military and civilian employees around the globe (the CIA employs about 17,000). In 1981, President Ronald Reagan further defined the agency's mission in an Executive Order as the "ability to understand the secret communications of our foreign adversaries while protecting our own communications." Its core competency has always been code breaking and code making, and it has maintained a capability to drive the development of sophisticated, high-tech information security systems.

The agency broke the Japanese military code to learn of Japan's plans to invade Midway Island in World War II, considered a turning point in the war. Its intelligence and surveillance activity enabled U.S. forces to not only disseminate misinformation to Saddam Hussein in Desert Storm, but to position and target forces in the offensive, as well. NSA's work led to the development of the first, large-scale computer and the first solid-state and semiconductor technologies. It operates one of the largest centers for foreign language and research in government; runs the National Cryptologic School, and deploys its technologies from "outer space to the office or foxhole," says the agency.

The NSA also is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S., to both design cipher systems to protect U.S. information systems, and to search for weaknesses in adversaries' systems and codes. Based in Fort Meade, Maryland, the agency describes its "customers" as the White House and other executive agencies, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military commands, multinational forces and allies, and industry.

And while the NSA may be "obsessively secretive," as author James Bamford put it in the Washington Post earlier this year, it makes no secret of its mission and goals as it sees them. "We will provide our customers the decisive information advantage by providing and protecting their vital information-GUARANTEED," says the agency on its extensive website. Dominant in its descriptions of its various goals and initiatives is a tone of aggressive information warfare practice, enabled by advancing technologies.

For military operations and allies-"whether for humanitarian or lethal purposes"--the agency says one of its goals is to "ensure cryptologic systems are interoperable with those of the Services and our Allies. We will develop the global connectivity that will allow the warfighter to plug in anytime, anywhere in the performance of any mission."

That "plug-in" connectivity capacity has spawned one of the agency's newest missions: To anticipate, prevent, and uncover cyber-attacks and cyber-warfare against its constituencies. "The threat to our information systems will grow in coming years as the enabling technologies to attack these systems proliferate and more countries and groups develop new strategies that incorporate such attacks," says Dr. John Deutch, former CIA director. In a recent speech inside the agency, Bamford says, NSA Director Hayden graphically described the "new challenges" the agency faces in information technology that has created information threats worldwide through the growth of the Internet (such as the Denial of Service attacks against Yahoo and other high-profile websites earlier this year).

"The scale of change is alarmingly rapid," Hayden was quoted by Bamford. "The world now contains 40 million cell phones, 14 million fax machines, 180 million computers, and the Internet doubles every 90 days."

And while it denies spying on U.S. companies' behalf, the NSA clearly considers part of its mission as cooperation with industry. The NSA says it works "closely" with U.S. industry to maintain its cryptological dominance. Its INFOSEC program not only assists industry, academia, and other government agencies in their investigations of security breaches, but exchanges technology to innovate breakthrough capabilities, such as supercomputing, as well. In what it terms "a broad zone of cooperation between government and industry," the agency says its takes maximum advantage of commercial components, using NSA-developed products and services to fill the gaps. If industry lags in developing the technologies NSA thinks it needs, the agency will drive the development, itself.

"No one, bar none, will be more innovative in seeking the technological advantages we will need to succeed in the 21st Century," says the NSA.

Based on the media fallout from the Echelon incident, neither the agency's credible critics nor its colleagues in the security community believe the NSA is routinely overstepping its authority. But at the same time, many also are calling for Congress and other organizations such as the European Parliament to penetrate the agency's veil of secrecy to ensure that fundamental rights of privacy are not being violated.

Opening the NSA's doors to investigative eyes-while at the same time preserving the U.S.'s and its Allies' intelligence dominance-is likely a classic case of Catch-22. And how the NSA might respond to deep probes into its operations is perhaps best expressed in a memorial to its deceased at Fort Meade:

"They Served in Silence: To those who made the ultimate sacrifice."

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