human sources as well as some technical intelligence collection. The Army,
Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have their own intelligence components
that collect information, help them decide what weapons to acquire, and serve
the tactical intelligence needs of their respective services.
Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the State Department; the intelligence
component of the Treasury Department; the Energy Department's Office of
Intelligence and Counterintelligence, the former of which, through leverag-
ing the expertise of the national laboratory system, has special competence in
nuclear weapons; the Office of Intelligence of the Coast Guard; and, today, the
Directorate of Intelligence Analysis and Infrastructure Protection in the
Department of Homeland Security.
The National Security Agency's intercepts of terrorist communications often
set off alarms elsewhere in the government. Often, too, its intercepts are con-
clusive elements in the analyst's jigsaw puzzle. NSA engineers build technical
systems to break ciphers and to make sense of today's complex signals environ-
ment. Its analysts listen to conversations between foreigners not meant for
them.They also perform "traffic analysis"--studying technical communications
systems and codes as well as foreign organizational structures, including those
of terrorist organizations.
nications revolution, and with loosely affiliated but networked adversaries using
commercial devices and encryption, the technical impediments to signals col-
lection grew at a geometric rate. At the same time, the end of the Cold War
and the resultant cuts in national security funding forced intelligence agencies
to cut systems and seek economies of scale. Modern adversaries are skilled users
of communications technologies.The NSA's challenges, and its opportunities,
increased exponentially in "volume, variety, and velocity."
gence requirements. Also, the NSA was supposed to let the FBI know of any
indication of crime, espionage, or "terrorist enterprise" so that the FBI could
obtain the appropriate warrant. Later in this story, we will learn that while the
NSA had the technical capability to report on communications with suspected
terrorist facilities in the Middle East, the NSA did not seek FISA Court war-
rants to collect communications between individuals in the United States and