NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum 122
Schneier writes "Most people might not be aware of it, but there's a National Cryptologic Museum at Ft. Meade, at NSA Headquarters. It's hard to know its exact relationship with the NSA. Is it part of the NSA, or is it a separate organization? Can the NSA reclassify things in its archives?" There's some interesting stuff in the comments about the building's reason for existence (window views a nearby NSA building?) and some stuff they have (an Enigma machine!).
Went there last year (Score:5, Interesting)
Very cool museum, I think I even saw Brian Kernighan there talking to what looked like young VC types.. Here's some pics I snapped..
http://www.thoughtcrime.com/NSA%20Museum/Site/NSA%20Museum%20visit.html [thoughtcrime.com]
We had a Storagetek silo like the one on display at my current corp, but spec'd out with LTO3 or LTO4.. I'm thinking NSA had one just like it but 10+ years earlier (and with older tape tech of course)..
Re:Went there last year (Score:5, Informative)
I was in Kingson Ontario over the weekend and discovered the Military Communications and Electronics Museum [c-and-e-museum.org] on a Canadian forces base. Hadn't planned on going or even heard of the place before -- we just drove by and decided to stop. Among other things they had an Enigma machine.
I would highly recommend stopping there if you happen to be in the area. Admission was free, though we opted to make a donation.
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The military group (Communications and Electronics Branch) is based in Kingston, and is sometimes called the forth element (in addition to Navy, Army, Air Force) as they are a combined cross-element branch, while the Communications Security Establishment [cse-cst.gc.ca] (CSE), which is the civilian SIGINT group, is based in Ottawa (Leitrim near airport). While they are civilian, often military personnel serve within the CSE.
I'm not sure if they C&E Branch are now the CF Joint Signal Regiment (CFJSR), which falls under
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CSE [wikipedia.org] (or CSEC) is the Canadian version of NSA (eh?).
For all we gripe out our omnipresent watchdogs, their museums are awesome, and I'm glad they're able to disclose as much as they can. (Deep down inside, I think I just envy them for having (and building!) really cool tech for years before any of us mere mortals see it :)
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To my surprise, since I went to the link, "The Museum: 10,000 square feet of display area with over 5,000 items to view". It seems well worth the visit.
That is really cool. I think on my next trip in the area, I'll go take a peek. Nice of you to make a donation, that would be my first thought as well. I woulda thought that NSA has a slightly larger budget for their museum than the CF so, the Canadian museum would be much smaller.
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They got a sizable donation from us because it was our last stop before crossing the border back into New York and we opted to give them all of our Canadian money rather than go to a currency exchange to get it changed back. I gave them $35 and change, my buddy did almost as much. Also spent some money in the gift shop.
I always walk away with a better feeling when I give my money to a museum than the usual tourist traps that one visits when on vacation.
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Somehow I've managed to miss that one despite visiting Kingston several times. I'll have to make it a stop next time I'm there.
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I was in Kingson Ontario over the weekend and discovered the Military Communications and Electronics Museum [c-and-e-museum.org] on a Canadian forces base. Hadn't planned on going or even heard of the place before -- we just drove by and decided to stop. Among other things they had an Enigma machine.
I would highly recommend stopping there if you happen to be in the area. Admission was free, though we opted to make a donation.
The National Cryptologic Museum is near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and MD-32. If you take the B&W Parkway a few more miles to BWI Marshall airport, there is a military electronics museum near the hotels adjacent to BWI Marshall. I visited that museum once. They have old radars and communications equipment on display.
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The only thing what was driving me nuts a a foreigner was the wording they used to describe everything:
The Russians where always "spying" on America, the Americans where always doing "reconaisance" on Russia.
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And in school, it's called "cheating", but in the military it's referred to as "gathering intelligence".
Love those dichotomies. Usually caused by a prejudiced perspective by the people describing the action. Assign the exact same description to both actions, but at the end tack on " that helps us" or "that hurts us", and poof, you need to pick between different words despite the actions being identical. That bit on the end doesn't have any bearing on the action when taken from a neutral perspective.
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Or in this case, clearly depends on the beholder.
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Really cool pictures, glad I got to scroll through them all before probably gets slashdotted, I'm definitely going to visit now. Seems like a lot of Museums have enigma machines it's cool to see that they have three different types there, along with a lot of cool 80's type spy gear.
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Cheers for sharing your photos, but that webpage totally unnecessarily needs javascript.... it's just some photos.
Anyway, a quick look at the source revealed where the pictures are, and as your server allows directory listing it is possible to browse the pictures without JS (albeit without thumbnails):
http://www.thoughtcrime.com/NSA%20Museum/Site/NSA%20Museum%20visit_files/ [thoughtcrime.com]
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I went there a few years ago. It is very cool. I was expecting it to be kind of lame, but quite the opposite. They have an enigma and a purple machine. I am into WWII stuff and at the time worked with ONI/NSA, so I was into it, but I think even if you aren't it's cool.
We were there in 2006, I think (Score:2)
It's a great idea to get a tour from a dosant. Ours was ex-NSA, and the commentary is was fantastic. There's more than one Enigma there, and also the American version of the Cryptographic Bombe, which broke the 4-wheeled Enigma code. Brings a whole new meaning to "brute force computing".
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I wonder if they have any of the devices I repaired in the '80s. KY-3, STU-III, KW-26, KG-13. I'd love to get documents on the KY-3 and emulate it using a DSP and FPGA. Yes it would be easily possible to do that securely but it has a aurally interesting startup sound when synchronizing and the audio quality is good but there is an added component which makes it unique.
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Ok, Enigma machine ... what else (Score:2)
There is also an Enigma Machine at the museum of science and industry in Chicago right next to the sub, I don't know of any other displays off the top of my head that could by at a museum solely dedicated to cryptography.
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I think the Smithsonian has one on display also. What I found interesting at the NSA museum was that they had a prewar commercial model that was marketed in England. It had fewer rotors than the later military versions.
Most of the stuff in the museum when I was there was WW2 era, notably excepting part of an old Cray computer. I don't think there is much danger of any of it being reclassified.
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There is also an Enigma Machine at the museum of science and industry in Chicago right next to the sub, I don't know of any other displays off the top of my head that could by at a museum solely dedicated to cryptography.
In the UK there's Bletchley Park [bletchleypark.org.uk]
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The Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach has an Enigma, along with a misinformed computer demo. There must have been thousands of Enigma machines captured. Wikipedia says 100,000 manufactured, including commercial ones. It also has a picture of the Enigma display at the Natl Cryptologic Museum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enigmas.jpg [wikipedia.org]
The machine was cool - no numbers, no punctuation - the narrated explanation was perfect, up until the demo, which was a simple substitution cipher: the same letter
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Well, it repeated after 16900 characters (and I realize that is de facto "not repeating", mentioned after the part I quote below).. or am I misunderstanding you?
From wikipedia's article on the enigma machine:
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They also have a big Polish "bomba" (Enigma decrypting device) IIRC. Also, when I went, the place was empty and one of the guys working there encouraged me and my friend to play with the Enigma machine, so that was pretty cool.
They have examples of phones that did voice encryption from the 1960s or 1970s... you can listen to decrypted audio and it's all garbled but still intelligible.
Neat little museum - not well known, but definitely worth checking out if you happen to be in that part of Maryland or you're
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However it's just on display behind glass. At the crypto museum the enigma is accessable and they let you use it. Much cooler, IMHO.
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When I last went to the National Cryptologic Museum (2002?) they had at least a half-dozen Enigma machines on display, including the rarer 4-rotor Kriegsmarine version. But the really cool thing was that besides the ones behind glass, they had one in the open that you could actually use.
They even had some scratch paper and golf pencils nearby for writing out and passing encrypted messages.
I've seen a number of Enigmas behind glass but had never laid hands on one until visiting this museum. I hope it's still
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Re:Ok, Enigma machine ... what else (Score:5, Informative)
Do any of the museums let you play with the enigma?
I was lucky enough to play with a Kommando 3+reverser dial enigma. The first thing I did was press L L L L L L L L L L L ... L which mightly impressed the librarian who looks after the collection of old crypto gear. An enigma will never lightup the same character as the key pressed. This enigma was owned by some organisation that I forget and rarely had a drooling nerd giving it the once over.
The point is that there are lots of hidden away secret caches of old crypto equipment that are kept as momentos from successful operations and never see the light of day. Of course, like the enigma itself, there are crypto units that are not disclosed because they have been cracked and are still in use by the public. The banking system used enigma until the 1950's even though the UK could decrypt messages effectively a decade before. (do you believe that collossus was really shut down?)
Typical german quality though, the woodwork on the case was fabulous and even 70 years later the lid shuts perfectly. The woodwork had inlaid coloured wood in it not unlike an ornate coffee table; I can only suppose that later enigma were a bit more rushed into production. The wee light bulbs had frosted ends so that cold russian front fingers can unscrew and change the bulbs. Although, if a bulb did go then some poor operator would have to carefully unscrew each bulb and test it in a little tester bulb slot. The operator would then have to do the crypto exercise again because the dials would have to be reset. Every key on the keyboard worked with a smooth action, not unlike a well oiled 1970's typewriter but they had quite a large depression so you could never have touch typed on this. I imagine soldiers on the front lines would have been trained for accuracy rather than efficiency so they probably typed with 1 finger and recorded each lit up character with a pencil and pad one at a time.
It was really heavy. Given that this was a Kommando unit then it probably was lugged about in comms vehicle (I wasn't told the back story) but I doubt that these were used in a ditch on a battlefield.
In my excitement, I can't remember of each dial rotated, or parts of the dial rotated on each keypress - there was a solid clunk and the sound of mechanical movement on each keypress; I would imagine that this would rotate the cipher on each keypress to make it harder to crack. The box had different dials in it - presumably from other machines or replacement units. Each had gears on it and neat wiring - and weighed about 2 lbs.
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Re:Ok, Enigma machine ... what else (Score:4, Interesting)
The banking system used enigma until the 1950's even though the UK could decrypt messages effectively a decade before. (do you believe that collossus was really shut down?)
Collossus wasn't used to crack Enigma - it was used to crack messages from Lorenz machines, which were more complicated than Enigma. The amazing thing is that the cryptologists at Bletchley were able to figure out the way the machine worked having never seen one (indeed, they didn't see one for over 2 years after cracking it) due to an error by a machine operator. But yes, I do believe it was really shut down and evidence destroyed - that's why it took so many years of painstaking reconstruction from photographs and human memory to rebuild one of the things...
The dials on an Engima rotate btw rather than parts inside of them. Each rotation of the wheels causes different pathways through the rotors to be used, thus changing the output - IIRC you can see the wiring inside some of the rotors at both the NSA museum, and the equally amazing Bletchley Park Museum in the UK (http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/)
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And me without mod points... *MODS!*
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Do any of the museums let you play with the enigma?
They do let you play with one of the Enigmas at Ft. Meade, and even have a pad of notepaper next to write down your plaintext and encoded messages.
What they don't let you play with is the limited run Japanese enigma machine, with kana printed on the keys. Apparently the Germans made a couple for the Japanese, but it didn't really catch on and they were never really used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japanese-enigma.jpg [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Ok, Enigma machine ... what else (Score:4, Interesting)
Also interesting and relevant is that a Navajo to Japanese dictionary wouldn't help. The Code Talkers used a code within a code, with their language being only the first layer. They also used a combination of standard military/intelligence community "talking code" (basically obscuring the meaning of phrases by referring to code words instead of places, people, or operations), and the simple fact that they had to reinterpret the language to include all the modern warfare technology and techniques they were imparting, to make most of the Code Talk incomprehensible to even native Navajo speakers. While not Code Talkers were ever captured alive, a number of regular Navajo troops were, and none could ever decode the signals Japanese intelligence forced them to listen to.
The Navajo that originally developed the Code Talk were clever on a number of levels. It really was a nearly perfect code. The only way to decode it would be to find a fluent speaker of the language (rare as Hell outside the tribe) who also happened to be an expert on codes and decoding messages (practically unheard of outside of the Code Talkers themselves).
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There's a reason... (Score:2, Interesting)
Most people might not be aware of it
Yes, because it's hidden down a road with potholes large enough to lose a small semi in. And to get to it, you need to all but drive up to the scary looking gates of the NSA before turning down said hidden road.
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To be honest, I haven't gone all the way back there in years, but I do know that coming out of the Shell Station on my motorcycle and navigating around the potholes always makes me nervous. :)
But yes, they realigned the road a couple of years ago, so it's in pretty good shape from the middle of the Shell to the NSA gate.
I was trying to make a (humorous) point that it's a museum that's really tucked away, and you have to know it's there. So it's no surprise that its existence isn't widely known. Though I *
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Re:There's a reason... (Score:4, Funny)
To get to the museum, you have to take the Route 32 exit towards Fort Meade, which actually ends at the employee entrance, if you accidentally miss the turn (to either the museum or the visitor entrance), you end up at the scary gates to the base, who then make you pull into a special area, where you are then surrounded by scary looking Chevy suburbans (atleast that was the case for me, I missed the exit...) who then search you vehicle, get all your information and run a background check, and if all goes well, escort you to the correct exit and send you on your way...
Moral of the story.. don't miss the exit...
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Moral of the story.. don't miss the exit...
So a background check, physical inspection, and the reason you are there (interest in cryptography).
This is a clear case of miss the exit and get a job interview ;)
Virtual Tour (Score:2)
The NSA has a virtual tour [nsa.gov] of the place on their website. Not exactly an immersible VRML experience or anything, but pretty nice none the less. There are also some nice videos in the flash frame on the main page, including a pretty cool overview of the 2009 CDX contest between the various military academies. The Press release for 2010 notes that Navy won this year (apparently in 2009, NSA Red Cell hacked Navy's website to say "we heart army" as one of their first actions, which probably had them motivate
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The Virtual Tour background image is a flag with three stars in the blue, and what looks like morse in six stripes. Hmm.
dah dit dah dit dit dah
dit dah dit dah dah dit
dah dah dit dah dah
dah dah dit dah dit dit
dah dah dah dah dah
dit dit dit dah dit dah dit
Sorry, I don't know how to get around the "junk charachter" filter with regular morse symbols.
Can the NSA reclassify things in its archives? (Score:5, Informative)
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Beyond that, NSA is the classifying authority in and of themselves. They can declassify documents on their own authority if they feel the documents no longer require the protection. Of course they rarely chose to do this, but they legally can. Mostly you're right though, the automatic declassification after 25 years is probably how 99.9% of declassification happen.
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Old news... (Score:3, Informative)
On 16 December 1993, the National Cryptologic Museum (NCM) opened its doors to the public... [cia.gov]
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Wow, they're good! Took 17 years before I even heard about the place!
Great museum... (Score:1)
1000 times better than the lame spy museum (Score:4, Interesting)
You know you are in the right place when the receptionist informs you that you can use the Enigma machine while you wait for the next tour group to start. Dig around in their library and look for books printed on line paper, that's the stuff you won't find anywhere else. Oh yea, the tour guides are also recruiters if you think you got what it takes.
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The spy museum is good fun though :-)
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And it's much different from the spy museum, which that place eventually pushes hollywood references, aka faked stuff.
No suprises here (Score:1)
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That's classified you insensitive clod.
Museums (Score:5, Informative)
The National Cryptographic Museum [nsa.gov] is where an old motel used to be (Colony 7 motel) and is a pretty cool place to visit. The Enigma works and you can spin the rotors, type, and encrypt/decrypt messages.
Nearby is the National Vigilance Park [nsa.gov], which has some cold war recon aircraft on display.
Being a geek you might as well do the multi-stage geocache [geocaching.com] which starts at the NVP. The NVP and nearby "unclassified" parking lot have a view of NSA buildings, and typically NSA police are quite visible patrolling the area.
And if you have time, cruise up to the BWI area and visit the National Electronics Museum [hem-usa.org].
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Ha! The National Electronics Museum is where I've gone with my dad a few times for a gathering of hams. While he's listening to the speakers, I wander around the exhibits. The addition of the thermal imaging is neat, as well as a few of the (limited) hands on exhibits in the beginning.
Not a great place as far as things go, but certainly interesting to visit for an hour or two.
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I second the National Electronics Museum, it is a very interesting museum with some very cool displays. My kids love to play with the IR camera setup there.
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My main objection is that the curator was interviewed by Slashdot many years ago but the interview results were never published. Damn bastards probably classified it.
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Geocaching outside the NSA? Oh, yeah, that sounds like a fabulous idea. I'll jump right on that next time I want the inside of my ass examined with a flashlight.
Opening hours are not very friendly (Score:2)
I would like to get there with a colleague during our upcoming business trip (if it will be approved - we are Czechs working for American company with office near Washington). However, the opening hours in the museum are quite unfriendly - basically only during the week (we will be at work), plus 1st and 3rd Saturday in month for 4 hours. We hope we will get on Saturday there, will have to plan accordingly.
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I think you are joking.
I doubt U.S. government would want something from us. First, we have already been to U.S. 2 years ago (on a similar business trip). Second, most of the U.S. secrets (I mean industrial) have been already outsourced to other countries, including mine (consider our company). So, all in all, I think two foreigners visiting a museum are pretty harmless to U.S. national security.
BTW. The U.S. is actually a nice place. There is more corruption in our country anyway. I think most Americans ar
There's great stuff there!!! Go see it! (Score:5, Informative)
even if it looks like a converted old school Howard Johnson motel of sorts! They actually have a lot of interesting stuff on display, besides an actual enigma machine that you can play with!
Interesting details that I noticed when I went this past summer: ;)
1) My car (and phone!) GPS suddenly drops dead and gets nothing in terms of signal.. it's like we drove off the planet or something! The onboard GPS had to resort to using car instrumentation data to give us a rough guesstimate of where we are - which we thought was really funny!
2) There's a sign by the main entrance to the NSA there that basically says don't even think about taking any pictures, even of the sign itself that says don't take any pictures!! Note: You make a left right at the main entrance to the parking lots to follow the side road to the museum while passing a permanently parked fighter jet and a gas station right before you get to it. It's really non-descript!
3) At the gift shop - we decided to buy a few things and charged it on the credit card.. when we got home and looked at the receipt - it doesn't even say NSA museum - it had some totally different name to it!
4) Also, they had a totally cheap and reasonable soda and snack machines tucked to the side of the entrance once you walk in! Totally surprising - but nice
and Incidentally, if you're thinking about going to the spy museum in downtown washington DC - *DON'T DO IT!* - it's an absolute travesty and waste of i think it was like $15? The NSA museum blows it away in terms of information and goodies to be seen - and WAYYYYYYYYYyyyyy cheaper too! The spy museum in DC is for kids. The NSA museum is for true Geeks!
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1>> Well, one should expect this when one is within shouting distance of one of the most secure buildings in the world. The same thing sometimes occurs near other buildings in the DC region. But Fort Meade? You're lucky you get stuff on your car radio.
2>> I work at that big five-sided building a few miles up the road from the NSA site. I was working a recent Saturday and on my way into the building, I spotted a small contingent of tourists from a friendly foreign nation (at least I hope they're
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Are you sure? I've known places to have soda/snack machines that were "totally cheap and reasonable" compared to usual costs that weren't subsidized at all, they just were priced to cover maintenance on the machine plus the bulk purchase cost of the goods sold, rather than priced to make a profit.
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4>> Subsidized with your tax dollars. I worked in a secure building with access restricted to certain people, and the soda machines in there sold canned brand-name drinks for fifty cents. In the "open" building across the parking lot, they were a buck.
Not necessarily subsidized. They may simply be declining to mark it up all that much. Typical retail prices are 50% over wholesale, give or take. Running a soda machine at-cost to keep the workers happy makes sense. But you can't do that in the "open" area without increasing costs substantially; if the people working in the area are constantly dropping by to buy discount soda, you'll get a lot of complaints from area retailers (you're hitting their bottom line), and you now need to refill the machine far mo
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1>> Well, one should expect this when one is within shouting distance of one of the most secure buildings in the world. The same thing sometimes occurs near other buildings in the DC region. But Fort Meade? You're lucky you get stuff on your car radio.
Why do they need to do active jamming? If the entire building is essentially a SCIF [wikipedia.org], what the risk? Nothing can leak out.
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If the stories further up are true, it looks like converted Motel because it is ;-)
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I think this is what you saw:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_B-66_Destroyer [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-130 [wikipedia.org]
great place (Score:1, Interesting)
i went there in 2000, on a trip from the UK. was driving though MD and saw signs to Fort Meade. got lost and ended up rocking up at the main NSA entrance. halfway through security i said "christ, im only here for the museum". at which point the friendly guards laughed and pointed me in the right way.
of course, this was before "the accident". had i been doing that a year later i'm guessing my stay at the NSA would have been considerably longer....
how times change. i genuinely long for the old days befor
Been there done that... (Score:2)
I have the tee shirt to prove it.
Lots of interesting cold war information there too. Most Americans don't know how many service men died collecting sigint during period from after WWII until the late 1980's
Enigma... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Worked at NSA... (Score:3, Interesting)
The absolute best job I ever had was a codebreaker at NSA in the mid 70's when I was with the Army Security Agency. Critical mission, challenging brain-straining job, and the most advanced computers on the planet to play with. Have never been to the museum but imagine it would bring back some memories. Most people immediately think "Oh boy, Enigma!", but that is only the most public of the items, and not necessarily the most interesting. My proudest possession is the Dundee Orange Marmalade jar that I still keep on my desk. You either know what that means, or you don't.
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My proudest possession is the Dundee Orange Marmalade jar that I still keep on my desk. You either know what that means, or you don't.
Clearly we either know or we don't... but does this mean you aren't gonna tell us?
If not.... why mention it?
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Dundee Orange Marmalade jar NSA
came up with this link [nsa.gov], right on the NSA's website.
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I keep my pencils in one of those - but then, I'm actually Scottish.
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... or you look it up in Wikipedia.
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It's the Twilight Zone (Score:4, Funny)
I have been there twice. Really interesting to any geek that likes computer history. One time I got into the museum and remembered I forgot to lock the doors on my truck. I mentioned it to an employee there and he said, "Oh, I wouldn't worry. It's being watched".
Get a group together (Score:1)
The day I went, a few years ago, I was fortunate because there was a busload of visitors there the same day (Daughters of the Revolution? Young Republicans? I don't know who they were). They had an official museum tour guide who gave a lot of history and details about what was in the exhibits, way more than was available on the displays alone. I was able to tag along and listen to it all. If at all possible, I urge you to see about getting a group together (through your workplace, school, boy scout tro
I broke the museum once (Score:2, Funny)
My connection (Score:2)
My parents stayed at the Colony 7 hotel on the first night of their honeymoon...
Part of the NSA? (Score:2)
"Is it part of the NSA, or is it a separate organization?"
If you don't know the answer to the simple puzzles, why would you bother to go and look at the complex ones? :)
-Charlie
I'm not really a crypto geek, but... (Score:2)
... when I visited my brother (he lives in Arlington, VA) last year he insisted we visit the museum. I said "sure, why not". I was really glad we did. Lots of great history there, and lots of hardware, too. As a previous poster said, you are able to and encouraged to play with an Enigma machine. Great photos and artifacts and whatnot. I was surprised just how interesting and informative it was - highly recommended to anyone visiting the area.
My family has donated some cool gear to this (Score:2, Interesting)