Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (99 page)

Speed not
only equals heat, it also equals massive demand for data storage. Increasing
use of space-eating multimedia files compounds the problem, as does the need to
make the information available to an ever larger group of customers. One
solution was Project Oceanarium, which for the first time automated the storage
of NSA's masses of multimedia Sigint reports.

At the
same time, Oceanarium modernized the way in which reports were retrieved and
distributed. Where once each spy agency jealously guarded its individual
intelligence files behind thick fortresses, today the buzz phrase is
"sharable databases." Through Oceanarium, NSA's dark secrets can now
be retrieved not only over its own internal intranet, Webworld, but throughout
the intelligence community via highly classified programs such as Intelink.

Because
the breadth and depth of NSA's data storage sea is finite, scientists are
turning to newer ways to narrow the rivers of information emptying into it.
Among the most promising are microscopic magnets, only one molecule in size.
Scientists at Xerox believe that such a magnet, made of a special combination
of manganese, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, may be able to pack data thousands
or even millions of times more densely than today's systems of memory storage.
Using these molecule-sized magnets, experts believe, it may someday be possible
to store hundreds of gigabytes of data—millions of typed pages—on an area no
larger than the head of a pin.

By 2001,
NSA's tape and disk storage capacity approached a density of ten gigabytes per
square inch—the equivalent of more than half a million typed, double-spaced
pages. But the closer data are packed, the harder they are to erase and the
more chance that telltale secrets will remain behind on reused media.
Therefore, another key area of research at NSA's LPS is exploring the
microscopic properties of data storage and erasure to find more effective ways
to rid used tapes and hard drives of all their old secrets. According to
computer expert Simson Garfinkel, tiny pieces of a hard drive can still contain
sizable amounts of information. For instance, a
¹
/
₁₆
-inch-square
piece of a six-gigabyte hard drive can hold 750,000 bytes—enough to fill a
300-page book. "A spy could remove a hard disk, grind it up, and smuggle
out the data in little pieces like pocket lint," said Garfinkel. To solve
the problem, NSA developed a drive-controlled disk sanitization device, which attaches
to the head disk assembly and can completely eradicate the sensitive
information used on disks and drives.

Inside
NSA's Supercomputer Research Center, the secret race for the fastest computer
seems almost unworldly. In 1994 and 1995 NSA scientists participated in a
series of meetings devoted to exploring the feasibility of a great leap forward
in computer technology. The goal was to advance from billions, past trillions,
to more than a quadrillion operations a second—pentaflop speed—within two
decades.

Among the
ideas developed by NSA for achieving speeds of over a quadrillion (10
¹⁵
)
mathematical operations a second was the placement of processors in the middle
of memory chips. Processor-in-memory chips, or PIMs, have the advantage of
reducing the time it normally takes for electronic signals to travel from the
processors to the separate memory chips. These PIM chips are now among the
products manufactured by the agency's Special Processing Lab.

By 2001,
the SRC had long since broken the teraflop barrier and was approaching petaflop
speeds—at which point time is measured in femtoseconds, the shortest events
known to science. With such extraordinary speed, a machine would be capable of
pounding a stream of intercepted, enciphered text with a quadrillion—a million
billion—possible solutions in the time it takes to wink. Original estimates by
scientists were that the outside world would reach that point sometime around
2010, but IBM intends to cut the wait in half with a mega-supercomputer dubbed
Blue Gene.

Over five
years, between 2000 and 2005, the company plans to build the fastest computer
on earth—500 times faster than anything currently in existence. "It will
suck down every spare watt of electricity and throw off so much heat that a gas
turbine the size of a jet engine is required to cool it off," said one
report. According to the company, the computer would be about forty times more
powerful than the aggregate power of the forty fastest supercomputers in the
world today—or 2 million times more powerful than the fastest desktop in
existence.

The
ultimate goal of Blue Gene is to solve a puzzle of a different sort from those
at NSA—although NSA may also secretly be a customer. Blue Gene's singular
objective is to try and model the way a human protein folds into a particular
shape. Because proteins are the molecular workhorses of the human body, it is
essential to discover their molecular properties. In a sense, Blue Gene is like
NSA's old RAMs, which were designed to attack one specific encryption system.

When
completed, Blue Gene will consist of sixty-four computing towers standing six
feet high and covering an area forty feet by forty feet. Inside will be a
mind-boggling one
million
processors. The target speed is a petaflop.

When NSA
crosses the petaflop threshold, if it hasn't already, it is unlikely that the
rest of the world will know. By 2005 the SRC, with years of secret, highly
specialized development accumulated, will likely be working with computers
operating at exaflop speeds—a quintillion operations a second—and pushing for
zettaflop and even yottaflop machines, capable of a septillion (10
²
*)
operations every time a second hand jumps. Beyond yottaflop, numbers have not
yet been named. "It is the greatest play box in the world," marveled
one agency veteran of the NSA's technology capability. "They've got one of
everything."

Operating
in the exaflop-and-above world will be almost unimaginable. The key will be
miniaturization, an area in which NSA has been pushing the theoretical
envelope. By
the mid-1990s, NSA's Special Processing Laboratory had
reduced the size of a transistor so much that seventy of them would fit on the
cross section of a human hair. NSA is also attempting to develop a new
generation of computer chips by bombarding light-sensitive material with ions
to etch out microscopic electronic circuit designs. Using ion beams instead of
traditional light in the process provides the potential for building far
smaller, more complex, more efficient chips.

In the
late 1990s NSA reached a breakthrough when it was able to shrink a
supercomputer to the size of a home refrigerator-freezer combination.
Eventually the machine was pared down to the size of a small suitcase, yet its
speed was increased by 10 percent. In 1999, a joint NSA and DARPA program
demonstrated that portions of a supercomputer could be engineered to fit into a
cube six inches on a side—small enough to fit into a coat pocket. The circuitry
was made of diamond-based multichip modules and cooled by aerosol spray to
remove the 2,500 watts of heat from the system.

But to
reach exaflop speed, computer parts—or even computers themselves—may have to be
shrunk to the size of atoms, or even of subatomic particles. At the SRC,
scientists looking for new and faster ways to break into encryption systems
have turned to quantum computing. This involves studying interactions in the
microscopic world of atomic structures and looking for ways to harness
individual atoms to perform a variety of different tasks, thereby speeding up
computer operations to an unthinkable scale.

NSA has
had a strong interest in quantum computing as far back as 1994, when Peter
Shor, a mathematician at Bell Laboratories, which has long had a close and
secret relationship with the agency, discovered the codebreaking advantages of
the new science. Since then, NSA has spent about $4 million a year to fund
research at various universities, and put additional money into studies at
government laboratories.

Operated
at top speed, a quantum computer could be used to uncover pairs of enormously
large prime numbers, which are the "passwords" for many encryption
systems. The largest number that ordinary supercomputers have been able to
factor is about 140 digits long. But according to another Bell Labs scientist,
Lov K. Grover, using quantum computing, 140-digit-long numbers could be
factored a billion times faster than is currently possible. "On paper, at
least," said Glover, "the prospects are stunning: ... a search engine
that could examine every nook and cranny of the Internet in half an hour; a
'brute-force' decoder that could unscramble a DES [Data Encryption Standard—the
encryption standard used by banks and most businesses] transmission in five
minutes."

A quantum
computer could also be used to speed through unfathomable numbers of
intercepted communications—a "scan" in NSA-speak—searching for a
single keyword, a phrase, or even, with luck, a "bust." Long the
secret leading to many of NSA's past codebreaking successes, a bust is an
abnormality—sometimes very subtle—in a target's cryptographic system. For
example, it may be an error in a Russian encryption program, or a faulty piece
of hardware, or a sloppy transmission procedure. Once such a hairline crack is
discovered, NSA code-breakers, using a massive amount of computer power in what
is known as a brute force attack, can sometimes chisel away enough of the
system to expose a golden vein of secret communications.

A
breakthrough into quantum computing came in April 1998, when researchers at
MIT, IBM, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of
Oxford in England announced they had succeeded in building the first working
quantum computers. The processor consisted of a witches' brew of hydrogen and
chlorine atoms in chloroform. Digital switches were shrunk down to the smallest
unit of information, known as a quantum bit, or qubit. Where once a traditional
computer bit would have to be either, for example, 0 or 1, a qubit could be
both simultaneously. Instead of just black or white, a qubit could become all
the colors of the rainbow.

According
to John Markoff, who has long followed the issue for the
New York Times,
another
milestone came in July 1999. That was when researchers at Hewlett-Packard and
the University of California at Los Angeles announced that they had succeeded
in creating rudimentary electronic logic gates—one of the basic components of
computing— only a single molecule thick. Four months later, scientists at
Hewlett-Packard reported they had crossed another key threshold by creating rows
of ultramicroscopic conductive wires less than a dozen atoms across.

Translated
into practical terms, a quantum computer could thus perform many calculations
simultaneously, resulting in a hyperincrease in speed. Now, instead of a
supercomputer attempting to open a complex cipher system—or lock—by trying a
quadrillion different keys one after another, a quantum computer will be able
to try all quadrillion keys simultaneously. Physicists speculated that such
machines may one day prove thousands or even millions of times faster than the
most powerful supercomputer available today.

The
discovery was greeted with excitement by the codebreakers in Crypto City.
"It looked for a long time like a solution without a problem," said
NSA's Keith Miller. At Los Alamos, where NSA is secretly funding research into
the new science, quantum team leader Richard J. Hughes added: "This is an
important step. What's intriguing is that they've now demonstrated the simplest
possible algorithm on a quantum computer."

Also
heavily involved in molecular-scale electronics, known as moletronics, is
DARPA, long NSA's partner in pushing computing past the threshold. Scientists
working on one DARPA program recently speculated that it may soon be possible
to fashion tiny switches, or transistors, from tiny clusters of molecules only
a single layer deep. Such an advance, they believe, may lead to computers that
would be 100 billion times as fast as today's fastest PCs. According to James
Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University who is working on
molecular-scale research, "A single molecular computer could conceivably
have more transistors than all of the transistors in all of the computers in
the world today."

On the
other side of the city, however, the
codemakers
welcomed the news with
considerable apprehension. They were worried about the potential threat to
NSA's powerful cipher systems if a foreign nation discovered a way to harness
the power and speed of quantum computing before the United States had developed
defenses against it. By 1999, for example, Japan's NEC had made considerable
progress with the development of a solid-state device that could function as a
qubit. "We have made a big step by showing the possibility of integrating
quantum gates using solid-state devices," said NEC's Jun'ichi Sone.
"It takes one trillion years to factorize a two-hundred-digit number with
present supercomputers," he said. "But it would take only one hour or
less with a quantum computer."

As
intriguing as quantum computing is, perhaps the most interesting idea on how to
reach exaspeed and beyond came out of the series of "great leap forward"
meetings in which the NSA took part in the mid-1990s. The computer of the
future—already with a circulatory system of cool, bubbling Fluorinert, an
artificial blood plasma—may be constructed partly out of mechanical parts and
partly out of living parts.

"I
don't think we can really build a machine that fills room after room after room
and costs an equivalent number of dollars," said Seymour Cray, one of
those at the meetings. "We have to make something roughly the size of our
present machines but with a thousand times the components." One answer to
scaling down to the nanometer, according to Cray, was to fabricate computing
devices out of biological entities. At the same time, other biological
processes could be used to manufacture nonbiological devices—for example,
bacteria could be bioengineered to build transistors.