Ok Skally,
You asked so you got it. First some background info on the NSA.
The National Security Agency is the most powerful and secretive of all the agencies that comprise what is called the intelligence community. They have a bigger budget then the CIA. They have an underground computer complex in Maryland that is measured in square miles. This is one of the super secure areas. I have never been in the really secure areas of their complex myself. One system they call “harvest” is nothing but rows and rows of computers that help screen the millions and millions of phone, cell, email and other communications they receive each day. It parses all these calls and looks for keywords, phrases etc. When something on the watch list is discovered, it puts that call in a queue for an intercept operator to look at. They have fleets of spy ships, scores of planes and large antenna arrays all over the world picking all this info up. They also work hand in hand with their British counterparts and jointly share info. Do you remember a few months back; that plane that crashed landed in China? That was one of their planes. Nothing but wall-to-wall listening devices in the belly of that plane. That is the main mission of this branch of the NSA; they have several branches.
As an aside, the NSA is so paranoid about keeping their mouth shut and not giving away any secrets, that when they invited me to lecture at their headquarters, they would not tell me who they were. At first they told me they were “DOD”. I said DOD, they said yes. I said DOD where? DOD at Fort Mead, I said Fort Mead Maryland, they said yes, I said isn’t that the headquarters of the NSA? He paused, stammered and then said yes, we would like you to speak to our security-working group. I said sure, glad too, but really it’s no secret, everybody knows who you are. He said OK and then we settled on a date and time. Strange people these spooks.
Another branch, the branch I was invited to lecture at deals mainly with computer security. They are responsible for defining computer and communication security standards for the federal government. They also have another lab within this part of the agency where they do really neat stuff. It was from this lab that special computer code, (call it a virus if you wish), was created.
The virus was designed to infect certain computers in Baghdad, that were part of their early warning radar. The code was uploaded to the computer via a direct connection. No not some remote hack job like in the movies, the computers were infected via code placed in a (ROM) read only memory chip. As I understand it the chip was physically located in a printer connected to the computer. Normally data only flows from a computer to a printer, and not the other way around.
These printers had what is known as flash programmable downloadable fonts. Code was changed in these chips and some of it was uploaded to the computers via what is known as a backdoor. The code stayed dormant until it received a signal sent by our planes during the bombing campaign.
The way we got the altered printers into Sadam’s system is also kind of interesting. I’m no big fan of France myself (sorry) as they tend to be a pain in the ass to our military sometimes. But this time they really came through for us. Not sure of the brand or type of printers, but I know they came from France and the French intelligence working with our boys made sure the Iraqi’s left with the printers with the modified code.
Anyway that is one of the reasons Baghdad was completely blind when we bombed them, and the other reason being our stealth planes are very hard to see on radar. So that’s the story. Don’t know any of this stuff first hand but my source has always been right before so I have no reason to doubt this. So do we kick ass or what!
Hope you enjoyed it.
Freeman
