Category Archives: NSA

THE UNITED STATES National Security Agency (NSA) has posted a Twitter message in which it apparently asked cryptographers if they want to apply to work there.

The NSA, which has been shaken by Edward Snowden's revelations, put up the coded message over the weekend.

It is pretty obviously a coded message, and we wonder what Snowden might make of it. Twitter users have been trying to crack it, and as you see below at least one Youtube walkthrough is already online.

Most of the NSA job adverts, which come from the @NSAcareers account, make sense to any Twitter user.

This one, though, from late yesterday was markedly different. "tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc dxkdciqcafmd vkfpcadf. #MissionMonday #NSA #news," it said, cryptically.

Compared to a normal solicitation for job applicants, it looks very strange indeed.

Szymon Machajewski, of Grand Valley State University's School of Computing and Information Systems said that is a "substitution cipher", and worked backwards from an assumption of what code letter best represents the letter "e".

Machajewski used common online tools, a Javascript method, to crack the code. It took less than eight minutes.

Perhaps disappointingly, the code is not actually a job advert, but a message to come back and check out the NSA job listings on a Monday.

"Want to know what it takes to work at the NSA?" it asked. "Check back each Monday in May as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

Read the rest here:

NSA looks to appeal to young cryptographers through coded ads

Orange Room

Brooke Sassman TODAY

2 hours ago

Are you NSA material? On Monday, the National Security Agency published a tweet with jumbled letters that led most followers to believe that it must have been sent by mistake. But it turns out the encrypted message was actually just a part of a new campaign to recruit the "best and brightest" coders to join their team.

"So they were fishing via social media for new employees or people who could be interested in working at the NSA," Tamron explained in the Orange Room Tuesday morning.

Unscrambled, the tweet says: "Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in May as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

So TODAY decided to put viewers to the test. At 7:17 a.m. we asked you to uncover our secret message in the Orange Room. Within two minutes, responses with the correct answer started rolling in.

Despite Savannah telling Tamron that she would have to leave the message up on the Orange Room screen longer to "give people a fighting chance," many TODAY fans quickly recognized that when rearranged, the letters spelled out, "but first, this is TODAY on NBC."

Although they weren't as quick as our viewers, eventually the anchors got it!

In the end, Willie was happy to know that the message was nothing more than a creative attempt to recruit new employees.

See more here:

TODAY fans decode NSA-inspired Orange Room message faster than Natalie, Savannah

What is the Role of the NSA? AFF Dallas Debates
Sponsored by the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, Ladar Levison, Founder of Lavabit LLC debates Steven Bucci of the Heritage Foundation about the role and actions of the National Security Agency.

By: AmericasFutureTV

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What is the Role of the NSA? AFF Dallas Debates - Video

Edward Snowden said CIA , and NSA had 52. 6 Billion for black budget
The Shadow Government: Guidance to President Obama and the Nation" (Pt. 1) on Saturday, Feb. 1, 2014. to view full lecture click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n293eFLlf9Q Follow Minister...

By: 48noifoi

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Edward Snowden said CIA , and NSA had 52. 6 Billion for black budget - Video

NSA Spying Still A Sore Spot Between U.S. And Germany
Washington President Barack Obama and visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged Friday that differences remain between their governments on surve...

By: Newsloop Top News

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NSA Spying Still A Sore Spot Between U.S. And Germany - Video

What Is Going on at NSA These Days
Richard George, Senior Advisor for Cyber Security, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab As a former NSA insider, the speaker will focus on some of th...

By: RSA Conference

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What Is Going on at NSA These Days - Video

Russ Tice: Life as a NSA Whistleblower
In this video Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange speaks with NSA Whistleblower Russ Tice about NSA oversight , access journalism, government leaks, life as a NSA whistleblower and the national whistlebl...

By: WeAreChange

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Russ Tice: Life as a NSA Whistleblower - Video

hide captionThe National Security Agency tweeted an encoded job ad on Monday.

The National Security Agency tweeted an encoded job ad on Monday.

What better way to recruit potential code breakers than to advertise in cipher? That's what the NSA did Monday morning with this mysterious tweet:

According to The Washington Post, if you're good at breaking substitution ciphers, this is what you'd come up with:

"want to know what it takes to work at nsa? check back each monday as we explore careers essential to protecting your nation."

At first, some people who saw the tweet thought the NSA might just be drunk or perhaps someone had inadvertently sent a butt tweet. But, it turns out that the coded tweet was the first of several in a monthlong campaign to "explore careers essential to protecting our nation," NSA spokeswoman Marci Green Miller told The Daily Dot.

"NSA is known as the code makers and code breakers," Miller told the website in an email. "As part of our recruitment efforts to attract the best and the brightest, we will post mission related coded Tweets on Mondays in the month of May."

The Daily Dot says:

"While posting coded messages on Twitter is a new recruitment strategy for the agency, NSA officials have been known to attend hacker conferences in attempt to cajole new talent."

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NSA's Encrypted Tweet: We're Hiring Code Breakers

The former head of the NSA asserted that one can't know whether spying is legitimate or not unless one knows all the details about it.

Reuters

Is state surveillance a legitimate defense of our freedoms? The question was put to Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, during a debate Friday evening in Toronto. Alan Dershowitz joined him to argue the affirmative. Glenn Greenwald and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian argued against the resolution.

No One Opposes All Surveillance: False Equivalence on the NSA

Going in, I expected to disagree with Hayden, who presided over the NSA's illegal program of warrantless wiretapping in the years after the September 11 attacks. But I want to emphatically agree with the very first remarks he made in the debate.

"State surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms," he said, restating the resolution. "Well, we all know the answer to that. It depends. And it depends on facts."

He quickly clarified:

It depends on the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves. What kind of surveillance? For what kind of purposes? In what kind of state of danger?

And that's why facts matter.

In having this debate, in trying to decide whether this surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms, we really need to know exactly what this surveillance is.

Original post:

Michael Hayden's Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance

This morning, the NSA Careers Twitter account posted what looked like a series of nonsense letters:

We looked at this tweetand thought it looked suspciously like a coded message.

It turns out that it was. A couple of our commenters on our earlier post came up with the deciphered message: "Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in May as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

While some of us were hoping that it would be instructions to secret agents, it's simply a notification of future tweets.

The message was encoded with a simple substitution cipher, one of the most basic ways to encrypt something. In a cipher of this type, the alphabet is scrambled, with each letter in the alphabet assigned to another letter.

For example, T in the encrypted message corresponds to W in the uncoded text, P corresponds to A, F corresponds to N, and C corresponds to T. That makes the first four letters of the encrypted message, "TPFC," turn into the first word of the decrypted message, "Want." Notice that spaces and punctuation don't matter in this code.

This is a very very basic type of encryption, and can be broken fairly easily. The big problem with substitution ciphers is that English letters have a distinct frequency distribution, as explained at Practical Cryptography:

So, to crack the code, the first step is to count up the letter frequencies in the encoded text, and put them into alignment with English-letter frequencies. The most common letters in the coded message will probably be the letters assigned to common letters in normal English, like e, t, or a. Letters that are missing or rare in the coded text will probably be assigned to rare English letters like q, x, and z.

More here:

REVEALED: Here's The Solution To That Encoded NSA Puzzle Tweet