Mixy, по-долу ти давам копие от изказването на генерал Майкъл Хейдън пред Сенатската комисия по разузнаването, направено на 17 октомври 2002 (т.е. повече от една година след инцидента от 11 септември 2001). Правя го в отговор на намека ти за качеството на работата на NSA. Обичам когато нещо говоря да не използвам фрази като "разбра се", "каза се", "във вестниците писаха" и т.н., а да съм максимално близко до първоизточника (когато е възможно, разбира се). Това изказване е любопитно (то е под клетва, разбра се) и защото е само третото публично изказване на такова ниво за ръководител на NSA от създаването досега (т.е. за повече от половин век). Мисля "четивото" е интересно освен като коментар на думите ти, и само за себе си.
Ето го (в публичната му част, за наше съжаление отговорите на въпросите на членовете на Комисията не са приведени):

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STATEMENT FOR THE RECORD BY
LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL V. HAYDEN, USAF
DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY/
CHIEF, CENTRAL SECURITY SERVICE
BEFORE THE
JOINT INQUIRY OF THE
SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
AND THE
HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE
ON INTELLIGENCE
17 OCTOBER 2002
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Introduction
1. Chairman Graham, Chairman Goss, and distinguished
members of the Intelligence Committees, thank you for
this opportunity to address you today. On behalf of
the National Security Agency (NSA), I wish to extend
our profound sympathy to the families of the victims
and to the survivors of this terrible attack.
2. We know our responsibilities for American freedom and security at
NSA. Our workforce takes the events of September 11, 2001 very
personally. By the very nature of their work, our people deeply
internalize their mission. This is personal.
3. Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, our director of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) visited and
calmed an emotionally shattered counterterrorism (CT) shop. That
shop is located near the top floor of one of our high-rise buildings.
For obvious reasons we had tried to move as many folks as possible
into the adjacent lower buildings but we could not afford to move
the CT shop. When I visited them later that afternoon, not only were
they hard at work, they were defiantly tacking up blackout curtains
to mask their location. Americans should be proud of these
dedicated men and women who serve in the front lines of the war
against terrorism.
4. This inquiry is very important, and it has played an important role for
us and for the country in determining why al-Qa’ida was able to
attack on that day with little warning and how we can better
detect and defeat these kinds of operations in the future. Since
April, we have hosted your staff in office spaces at our
headquarters. We have shared data with them and—in response
to their requests—have made available over 2,750 documents,
some 15,000 pages of material, and arranged over 200 face-to-
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face meetings. We have assigned some of our best people to work
full time with them. We have done this because—like you—we are
committed to finding the full story of what led up to September 11th
and to eliminating systemic problems that hamper our ability to
aggressively collect against terrorists.
5. My goal today is to provide you and the American people with as
much insight as possible into three questions: (a) What did NSA
know prior to September 11th, (b) what have we learned in
retrospect, and (c) what have we done in response? I will be as
candid as prudence and the law allow in this open session. If at
times I seem indirect or incomplete, I hope that you and the public
understand that I have discussed our operations fully and
unreservedly in earlier closed sessions.
6. You well know the fragility of all that we do and how efforts
measured in millions of dollars and thousands of man-years are
turned to naught overnight when a story about communications
intercepts appears in the press. Such leaks make the intelligence
challenges that we face just that much more difficult and costly. A
setback of inestimable consequences in the war against terrorism
occurred when Usama bin Laden and his key lieutenants stopped
using a phone following 1998 press reports of our intercepts.
7. You are also well aware that the nation’s SIGINT effort has
successfully thwarted numerous terrorist attacks in the past. While
our successes are generally invisible to the American people,
everyone knows when an adversary succeeds. NSA has had many
successes, but these are even more difficult to discuss in open
session.
What Did NSA Know Prior to September 11?
8. So, to the first question: What did NSA know prior to September 11th?
. Sadly, NSA had no SIGINT suggesting that al-Qa’ida was
specifically targeting New York and Washington, D.C., or even that
it was planning an attack on U.S. soil. Indeed, NSA had no
knowledge before September 11th that any of the attackers were
in the United States.
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9. I have briefed the committees on one area where our
performance—in retrospect—could have been better. Ms. Hill
referred to this in her September 20, 2002 testimony: “Unbeknownst
to the CIA, another arm of the intelligence community, the NSA,
had information associating Nawaf al-Hazmi with the Bin Laden
network. NSA did not immediately disseminate that information,
although it was in NSA’s database.” This was not some culturally
based “failure to share.”
10.As you know, one of our “value added” activities is sorting through
vast quantities of data and sharing that which is relevant, in a
usable format, with appropriate consumers. In this case, we did not
disseminate information we received in early 1999 that was
unexceptional in its content except that it associated the name of
Nawaf al-Hazmi with al- Qa’ida. This is not to say that we did not
know of and report on him and other individuals. We did. In early
2000, at the time of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, we had the al-
Hazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salim, as well as Khalid al-Mihdhar, in
our sights. We knew of their association with al Qa'ida, and we
shared this information with the community. I've looked at this
closely. If we had handled all of the above perfectly, the only new
fact that we could have contributed at the time of Kuala Lumpur
was that Nawaf's surname (and perhaps that of Salim, who
appeared to be Nawaf’s brother) was al-Hazmi.
11.There is one other area in our pre-September 11th performance that
has attracted a great deal of public attention. In the hours just prior
to the attacks, NSA did obtain two pieces of information suggesting
that individuals with terrorist connections believed something
significant would happen on September 11th. This information did
not specifically indicate an attack would take place on that day. It
did not contain any details on the time, place, or nature of what
might happen. It also contained no suggestion of airplanes being
used as weapons. Because of the processing involved, we were
unable to report the information until September 12th.
12.To put this into some perspective, throughout the summer of 2001
we had more than 30 warnings that something was imminent. We
dutifully reported these, yet none of these subsequently correlated
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with terrorist attacks. The concept of “imminent” to our adversaries
is relative; it can mean soon or simply sometime in the future.
13.These two reports have become somewhat celebrated so I would
like to dwell on them for a moment longer. I will set aside the
damage done to intelligence sources and methods when
unauthorized information enters the public domain. I will also set
aside the impact on the workforce I represent when something it
has legitimately kept secret from our adversaries suddenly leaps into
the media.
14.What is missing is a sense of how SIGINT is done. Thousands of times
a day, our front-line employees have to answer tough questions like:
Who are the communicants? Do they seem knowledgeable?
Where in the conversation do key words or phrases come? What is
the reaction to these words? What world and cultural events may
have shaped these words? (You may recall that Ahmad Shah
Masood, head of the Northern Alliance, was killed the day before.)
How much of the conversation is dominated by these events and
are any of the phrases tied to them?
15.And, if you were responsible for the management (or oversight) of
NSA, you would have to ask other questions like: Where was the
information collected? Were any of the communicants targeted?
How many calls a day are there from this location? In what
languages? Hazzar? Urdu? Pashto? Uzbek? Dari? Arabic? Is
there a machine that can sort these out by language for you, or do
you have to use a human? If there is such a machine—does it work
in a polyglot place where one conversation often comprises several
languages? How long does it take NSA to process this kind of
material? (After all, we are not the intended recipients of these
communications). Does our current technology allow us to process
it in a stream or do we have to do it in batches? When the data is
processed, how do we review it—oldest to newest or newest first?
And aside from how we normally process it, did the sequence
change at 08:46 a.m. on September 11th? Without explaining the
context in which SIGINT operates, unauthorized disclosures do not
inform public discourse; they misshape it.
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16.That summarizes what NSA knew about the hijackers prior to
September 11th. We have diligently searched our repositories and
we will continue to do so. We will, of course, provide your staff with
any and all relevant information we uncover.
What Has NSA Learned in Retrospect?
17.Now let me now address the second question. What have we
learned in retrospect? The primary lesson is that NSA was indeed on
the right path—a path of transformation. Congressional leaders
told me at our first meeting more than three years ago that the
Agency had fallen behind and was in danger of irrelevance. The
challenge was above all technological. As one Congressional
leader put it, “You need to hit a home run your first time at bat.”
18.The volume, variety and velocity of human communications make
our mission more difficult each day. A SIGINT agency has to look
like its target. We have to master whatever technology the target is
using. If we don’t, we literally don’t hear him; or if we do, we
cannot turn the “beeps and squeaks” into something intelligible.
We had competed successfully against a resource-poor, oligarchic,
technologically inferior, and overly bureaucratic nation state. Now
we had to keep pace with a global telecommunications revolution,
probably the most dramatic revolution in human communications
since Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.
19.To be sure, we were still producing actionable SIGINT—in some ways
the best we had ever produced—but we were accessing and
processing a smaller portion of that which could and should have
been available to us. To put it succinctly, we did not know what we
did not know. Public commentary on this usually comes at us in the
form of “the Agency has failed to keep up with technology.”
Actually, we have made substantial progress but I would agree that
we have a long way to go.
20.We are digging out of a deep hole. NSA downsized about onethird
of its manpower and about the same proportion of its budget
in the decade of the 1990s. That is the same decade when
packetized communications (the e-communications we have all
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become familiar with) surpassed traditional communications. That
is the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16
million to 741 million—an increase of nearly 50 times. That is the
same decade when Internet users went from about 4 million to 361
million—an increase of over 90 times. Half as many landlines were
laid in the last six years of the 1990s as in the whole previous history
of the world. In that same decade of the 1990s, international
telephone traffic went from 38 billion minutes to over 100 billion. This
year, the world’s population will spend over 180 billion minutes on
the phone in international calls alone.
21.It was clear to us that we had to recapitalize if we were to keep up.
The danger was not that SIGINT would go away, but that it would
cease to be an industrial strength source of American intelligence.
It would, we feared, begin to resemble an intelligence boutique:
limited product line, limited customer set, and very high unit prices.
22. By the end of the 1990s—with a budget that was fixed or falling and
demands from our customers that were unrelenting—we attempted
to churn about $200 million per year in our program. This meant
taking money away from current, still active, still producing activities
and investing those dollars in future capabilities. $200 million per
year was far short of what we needed and, in fact, I could make
only about one-third of that number stick as our program went
through the Executive Branch and the Congress.
23.I went public with an aspect of this dilemma in an interview with
CBS News that aired on “60 Minutes II” in February 2001. David
Martin was pressing me about our technological challenge and he
was using al-Qa’ida and Usama bin Laden as his examples. I
pointed out that al-Qa’ida did not need to develop a
telecommunication system. All it had to do was harvest the
products of a three trillion dollar a year telecommunications
industry—an industry that had made communications signals
varied, global, instantaneous, complex, and encrypted. During that
interview, David asked me for an assessment, specifically about al-
Qa’ida. I told him: “David, it's a dangerous world out there. I can't
guarantee you—in fact, I would refuse to guarantee you—that
even if we were at the top of our game, ill things won't happen to
Americans. These are very dedicated, very dangerous adversaries.
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And we work very hard against them and they obviously work very
hard to protect themselves against us.”
24.Shortly after September 11th, I had a meeting of my senior leaders. I
asked them the following question: Is there any part of our
transformation roadmap that we should change as a result of the
attacks? Unanimously, they responded, “No, but we need to
accelerate these changes.” With the money the President has
requested and Congress has provided, we have done just that. We
still have much to do but these committees know better than most
the performance of NSA in the current war. I know in my heart that
this level of sustained excellence would not have been possible
without the business process, organizational, personnel, and
operational changes we have set in place and you have
supported.
What Has NSA Done in Response?
25.The final issue—what have we done in response—will allow me to
give some specifics although I may be somewhat limited by the
demands of classification. I will use some of the terms that Congress
has used with us over the past year.
26.It was heartening, for example, to hear Congress echo the phrase
of our SIGINT Director, Maureen Baginski, in the belief that we need
to be “hunters rather than gatherers.” She believed and
implemented this strategy well before September 11th, and then she
applied it with a vengeance to al-Qa’ida after the attacks.
27.Another part of our strategy for nearly three years has been a shift
to a greater reliance on American industry. We have been moving
along this path steadily and we have the metrics to show it. As you
know, in project GROUNDBREAKER we have already outsourced a
significant portion of our information technology so that we can
concentrate on mission. We have partnered with academia for our
systems engineering. I have met personally with prominent
corporate executive officers. (One senior executive confided that
the data management needs we outlined to him were larger than
any he had previously seen). Three weeks ago we awarded a
contract for nearly $300 million to a private firm to develop
TRAILBLAZER, our effort to revolutionize how we produce SIGINT in a
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digital age. And last week we cemented a deal with another
corporate giant to jointly develop a system to mine data that helps
us learn about our targets. In terms of “buy vs. make” (the term
Congress has used), we spent about a third of our SIGINT
development money this year making things ourselves. Next year
the number will be 17%.
28.Congress has also said that we had listened in on “large volumes of
phone calls from the part of the world where al-Qa’ida was
located…but didn’t focus on al-Qa’ida.” That is, frankly, incorrect.
Ms. Hill gives NSA good marks in her report for being aware of the
Director of Central Intelligence’s declaration of war on al-Qa’ida.
29.We were focusing on al Qa’ida. But did we have enough linguists
and analysts focused on the problem? Clearly we could have used
more, but if these hearings were about a war that had broken out in
Korea or a crisis in the Taiwan Straits, if we had been surprised by
conflict in South Asia, if we had lost an aircraft over Iraq, or if
American forces had suffered casualties in Bosnia or Kosovo—in any
of these cases, I would be here telling you that I had not put
enough analysts or linguists against the problem. We needed more
analysts and linguists across the Agency—period.
30.In that light, Congress has criticized us for a “failure to recruit,”
especially to recruit linguists and analysts. Let me try to present the
facts on that. NSA recruiting for the decade of the 1990s was
indeed minimal. The Agency accomplished the downsizing that
was imposed on it in the easiest and most humane way possible—it
shut the front door. But as these committees know, we turned the
“recruiting corner” in 2000, and 2001 was actually a record year for
Agency recruiting, the best in over a decade. On one day alone in
February of 2001 we interviewed some 1,700 applicants. Before the
attack in September 2001 we had brought more than 600 new
people on board. By September 11th, we had reached a pause in
our hiring. We had already reached the legally authorized
personnel levels you had set.
31.With your help we have sustained our recruiting efforts in 2002. Well
over 800 people have come on board this year and our goal for
next year—if Congress gives us the additional billets we have
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requested—will be 1,500. NSA has received over 73,000 resumes
since the 11 September attacks, and we have been very
aggressively seeking the best and the brightest. We know we have
a rare opportunity to shape the path of American cryptology for
the 21st century.
Conclusion
32.I want to end by focusing on some comments made in recent
hearings about NSA’s “unwillingness” to share information. I need to
be clear on this point. We are a SIGINT agency. Our mission in life is
to provide information to all source analysts, military commanders,
policy makers and others in the U.S. government. Our only measure
of merit is the quality and quantity of information that we push out
the door every day. As we speak, NSA has over 700 people—not
producing SIGINT—but sitting in our customers’ spaces explaining
and sharing SIGINT.
33.There have been some special concerns raised about our
willingness to share SIGINT with law enforcement. The fact is that
NSA provides a significant amount of SIGINT to law enforcement
every day. FBI headquarters routinely receives some 200 reports
daily from us. When this is further distributed within FBI, the recipients
may not realize it is SIGINT because it is handled in such a way as to
protect sources and methods from being disclosed.
34.Much has been said in these hearings about a “wall” between
intelligence and law enforcement. I will speak only of NSA but I
think it fair to say that—historically—we have been able to be more
agile in sharing information with some customers (like the
Department of Defense) than we have with others (like the
Department of Justice). This is not something that we created or
chose. For very legitimate reasons, Congress and the courts have
erected some barriers that make the sharing with law enforcement
more careful, more regulated.
35.As a practical matter, we have chosen as a people to make it
harder to conduct electronic searches for a law enforcement
purpose than for a foreign intelligence purpose. This is so because
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law enforcement electronic searches implicate not only 4th
Amendment privacy interests, but also 5th Amendment liberty
interests. After all, the purpose of traditional law enforcement
activity is to put criminals behind bars.
36.There is a certain irony here. This is one of the few times in the history
of my Agency that the Director has testified in open session about
operational matters. The first was in the mid 1970s when one of my
predecessors sat here nearly mute while being grilled by members
of Congress for intruding upon the privacy rights of the American
people. Largely as a result of those hearings, NSA is governed
today by various executive orders and laws and these legal
restrictions are drilled into NSA employees and enforced through
oversight by all three branches of government.
37.The second open session was a little over two years ago and I was
the Director at that time. During that session the House intelligence
committee asked me a series of questions with a single unifying
theme: How could I assure them that I was safeguarding the
privacy rights of those protected by the U.S. constitution and U.S.
law? During that session I even said—without exaggeration on my
part or complaint on yours—that if Usama bin Laden crossed the
bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario to Niagara Falls, New York, U.S.
law would give him certain protections that I would have to
accommodate in the conduct of my mission. And now the third
open session for the Director of NSA: I am here explaining what my
Agency did or did not know with regard to 19 hijackers who were in
this country legally.
38.When I spoke with our workforce shortly after the September 11th
attacks, I told them that free people always had to decide where
to draw the line between their liberty and their security, and I noted
that the attacks would almost certainly push us as a nation more
toward security. I then gave the NSA workforce a challenge: We
were going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe
again.
39.Let me close by telling you what I hope to get out of the national
dialogue that these committees are fostering. I am not really
helped by being reminded that I need more Arabic linguists or by
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someone second-guessing an obscure intercept sitting in our files
that may make more sense today than it did two years ago. What I
really need you to do is to talk to your constituents and find out
where the American people want that line between security and
liberty to be.
40.In the context of NSA's mission, where do we draw the line between
the government's need for CT information about people in the
United States and the privacy interests of people located in the
United States? Practically speaking, this line-drawing affects the
focus of NSA's activities (foreign versus domestic), the standard
under which surveillances are conducted (probable cause versus
reasonable suspicion, for example), the type of data NSA is
permitted to collect and how, and the rules under which NSA
retains and disseminates information about U.S. persons.
41.These are serious issues that the country addressed, and resolved to
its satisfaction, once before in the mid-1970's. In light of the events
of September 11th, it is appropriate that we, as a country, readdress
them. We need to get it right. We have to find the right balance
between protecting our security and protecting our liberty. If we
fail in this effort by drawing the line in the wrong place, that is, overly
favoring liberty or security, then the terrorists win and liberty loses in
either case.
42.Thank you. I look forward to the committees’ questions.

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