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Just declassified: “A Reference Guide to Selected Historical Documents Relating to the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, 1931–1985.” Formerly “Top Secret UMBRA.” From my quick scan, there are minimal redactions.
From 1871:
I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring newspaper headings concerning railroad disasters, less than three hundred people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six—or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straightway suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country; so the double number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise.
By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger trains each way every day—sixteen altogether; and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in six months—the population of New York city. Well, the Erie kills from thirteen to twenty-three persons out of its million in six months; and in the same time 13,000 of New York’s million die in their beds! My flesh crept, my hair stood on end. “This is appalling!” I said. “The danger isn’t in travelling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again.”
Interesting story:
The phone’s ringer is a pretty simple thing: there’s a coil, a magnet and a hammer controlled by the magnet that hits the gongs when there is AC current in the coil. The ringer system is connected directly to the phone line when the phone is on hook. (Actually through a capacitor that protects the ringer system from DC current normally present in the line.)
If you haven’t figured yet, the coil with the hammer is a speaker, not a perfect one, but a speaker anyway, and that also means that the system can be used as an electrodynamic microphone. Any ordinary speaker is an electrodynamic microphone at the same time, if you hook it up to an audio amplifier using normal microphone input.
So this was how actually they, the KGB, did their eavesdropping, I thought. They didn’t need to freeze outside or put bugs in our homes, because they had a nice wiretapping device in every single home in the country. The shocking part of it was that they didn’t just eavesdrop phone conversations – that one was kind of obvious. They were able to hear everything. The PSTN switching stations were considered strategic objects, they were under KGB’s control and surely it was no problem for them to get a few powerful amplifiers hooked up to certain lines leading to homes they needed to eavesdrop. Simple!
I already blogged about this; there’s more information in this new article:
Included in the items the German army allowed humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers, the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it was the ideal size for a top-secret escape kit that could help spring British POWs from German war camps.
The British secret service conspired with the U.K. manufacturer to stuff a compass, small metal tools, such as files, and, most importantly, a map, into cut-out compartments in the Monopoly board itself.
A 1934 story from the International Herald Tribune:
Dynamite Found On Track
SPOKANE Discovery of a box of useless dynamite on the railway track two and a half miles southwest of this city led to special precautions being taken to guard the line over which President Roosevelt’s train passed this morning [August 4] en route to Washington. Six deputy sheriffs guarded the section of the line near which the discovery was made. The President’s train passed safely at 10 a.m. Officials are skeptical about the dynamite having any connection with a possible plot against the President.
Imagine if the same thing happened today.
From Cryptosmith:
The NSA had an incinerator in their old Arlington Hall facility that was designed to reduce top secret crypto materials and such to ash. Someone discovered that it wasn’t in fact working. Contract disposal trucks had been disposing of this not-quite-sanitized rubish, and officers tracked down a huge pile in a field in Ft. Meyer.
How did they dispose of it? The answer is encrypted in the story’s text!
The story sounds like it’s from the early 1960s. The Arlington Hall incinerator contained a grating that was to keep the documents in the flames until reduced to ash. The grate failed, and “there was no telling how long the condition had persisted before discovery.”
Last month, I posted this. There’s an update with new information (the FOIA redactions were appealed).
Interesting, at least to me. It helps if you know the various code names and the names of the different equipment.
Another recently unclassified NSA document: Jeffrey Friedman, “TEMPEST: A Signal Problem,” NSA Cryptologic Spectrum, Summer 1972.
EDITED TO ADD (2/12): Article on the topic.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.