The only inkling the National Cryptologic Museum gives you that the NSA might be watching what you're doing is a big sign that tells you you're being watched."NOTICE: Surveillance cameras in use for your safety," it says.Considering it appeared at a place that ostensibly exists to tell you what the National Security Administration does, I thought the sign was a kind of tongue-in-cheek Big Brothery joke, or maybe part of the museum's artifacts. A quick look to the right confirms that yes, there is a surveillance camera pointed at me. Forgive me for the blurry photo—I was a bit spooked snapping pictures in there.
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Besides that camera, there's a whole lot of letting you know that the NSA is watching the enemy—Hitler, the Japanese, the Viet Cong, and the terrorists. But there's no reason to suspect they might be watching you.The sign is on a pillar that also has a cartoon of a frazzled museum director being asked to answer pesky questions such as "What does the NSA do?"If you're interested in the answer to that question, you're better off reading our coverage of the surveillance state than visiting the museum.The museum was founded in 1993 in an old dinner hall near the NSA national headquarters in Maryland's Annapolis Junction. (Perhaps ironically, the museum and NSA HQ are less than a mile from where Bradley Manning is currently being tried.) Turn left off Canine Road and you hit the museum; a right takes you to the NSA HQ "Visitor's Center," which of course is not open to visitors.A sign near the entrance of the museum takes a decent shot at letting visitors know what the agency does. "It is the mission of the National Security Agency and the Central Security Service to learn what it can about potential threats to our national security and to protect our nation's government communications," it says.
When I asked Lou Leto, an NSA spokesperson, whether he thought the museum gives people a good idea of what the NSA does today, he said the NSA's mission has largely been the same since it was formed in 1952.
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"The museum is a venue to educate the public about American cryptology," Leto said. "Like any museum, it tells the story of the past and how it affects the present. You'll see that the approach to cryptology hasn't changed, the technology has. Cryptology has existed since the dawn of time - when there have been two parties and one doesn't want to let the other party know what they're saying. Technology has just made it more sophisticated and faster."
So, instead of using analog ciphers, Native American Code Talkers, and good ol' fashioned secret agents, we have PRISM, massive data centers, and metadata mining. Same thing.I've driven past the National Cryptologic Museum hundreds of times, its brown sign on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway intriguing me, but it's never been enough for me to stop on the way to an Orioles game or on the way home from a road trip north. Then Edward Snowden told the world that the NSA is checking in on pretty much everything you do, and it seemed like a pretty good time to check it out.Apparently others don't agree. Besides a group of elementary schoolers on a field trip from summer camp, the museum was all but empty. An employee there says they've had no additional interest since the NSA leaks, though attendance as a whole is up over the last couple years. The free museum brings in about 60,000 people each year.What they see is a series of early ciphers used to encode and decode messages (including the Enigma cipher machine), early supercomputers, an exhibit dedicated to the Native American Code Talkers of World War II, a deep explanation of the Zimmermann Note, and a few cases of antique books written in Latin or German that demonstrate, as Leto said, that cryptology is anything but new.
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What you won't see is anything that's being used these days. The museum is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary, yet the most recent super computer they've got is an old Cray, which was put out of commission the same year the museum opened."We can get close to the present, if you consider the last 15 years or so the present," Leto said.Not quite.For the most technologically-advanced government agency on the face of the Earth, the NSA's museum is remarkably quaint. The whole thing has a 70s, wood-panel-y feel to it. The plethora of Cold War-era telephones, World War II propaganda posters (Loose lips sink ships!) and supercomputers the size of storage lockers don't do anything to help change that perception. Neither does the gift shop, where you can buy NSA-emblazoned golf balls and tees, pink stuffed frogs wearing NSA t-shirts, and a Navajo Code Talker GI Joe.
The lone references to anything people use these days are posters advising you to "enable data protection on the iPad" and tells social media users to "think twice about posting information such as address, phone number, place of employment, and other personal information that can be used to target or harass you."That's not to say the museum isn't worth a trip if you're ever in the DC area. If you're interested in the history of encryption and code breaking, it's got more information and artifacts than you could ever want about the old way the NSA used to do things. Just don't expect to learn anything about what they're doing today.
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When I asked Lou Leto, an NSA spokesperson, whether he thought the museum gives people a good idea of what the NSA does today, he said the NSA's mission has largely been the same since it was formed in 1952."The museum is a venue to educate the public about American cryptology," Leto said. "Like any museum, it tells the story of the past and how it affects the present. You'll see that the approach to cryptology hasn't changed, the technology has. Cryptology has existed since the dawn of time - when there have been two parties and one doesn't want to let the other party know what they're saying. Technology has just made it more sophisticated and faster."
So, instead of using analog ciphers, Native American Code Talkers, and good ol' fashioned secret agents, we have PRISM, massive data centers, and metadata mining. Same thing.I've driven past the National Cryptologic Museum hundreds of times, its brown sign on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway intriguing me, but it's never been enough for me to stop on the way to an Orioles game or on the way home from a road trip north. Then Edward Snowden told the world that the NSA is checking in on pretty much everything you do, and it seemed like a pretty good time to check it out.Apparently others don't agree. Besides a group of elementary schoolers on a field trip from summer camp, the museum was all but empty. An employee there says they've had no additional interest since the NSA leaks, though attendance as a whole is up over the last couple years. The free museum brings in about 60,000 people each year.What they see is a series of early ciphers used to encode and decode messages (including the Enigma cipher machine), early supercomputers, an exhibit dedicated to the Native American Code Talkers of World War II, a deep explanation of the Zimmermann Note, and a few cases of antique books written in Latin or German that demonstrate, as Leto said, that cryptology is anything but new.
What you won't see is anything that's being used these days. The museum is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary, yet the most recent super computer they've got is an old Cray, which was put out of commission the same year the museum opened."We can get close to the present, if you consider the last 15 years or so the present," Leto said.Not quite.For the most technologically-advanced government agency on the face of the Earth, the NSA's museum is remarkably quaint. The whole thing has a 70s, wood-panel-y feel to it. The plethora of Cold War-era telephones, World War II propaganda posters (Loose lips sink ships!) and supercomputers the size of storage lockers don't do anything to help change that perception. Neither does the gift shop, where you can buy NSA-emblazoned golf balls and tees, pink stuffed frogs wearing NSA t-shirts, and a Navajo Code Talker GI Joe.
The lone references to anything people use these days are posters advising you to "enable data protection on the iPad" and tells social media users to "think twice about posting information such as address, phone number, place of employment, and other personal information that can be used to target or harass you."That's not to say the museum isn't worth a trip if you're ever in the DC area. If you're interested in the history of encryption and code breaking, it's got more information and artifacts than you could ever want about the old way the NSA used to do things. Just don't expect to learn anything about what they're doing today.