William F. Friedman and the 2,400 Dead at Pearl Harbor
The man who broke the PURPLE cipher kept personal records on the disaster at Pearl Harbor, filling gaps the official history left blacked out for decades.
By Harlan Pryce ·
NSA
Herbert Yardley and a Redacted Lineage of American Codebreaking
A three-volume history of American cryptography remained secret for decades, and specific details of the pre-1940 era remain blacked out today.
By Vera Kessler ·
Eisen Jr. and the 1995 Shift to State-Sponsored Netwar
The 1995 manual for attacking enemy networks moved cyber-warfare from the fringe to the bridge, while the actual targets remained hidden in classified annexes.
By Harlan Pryce ·
1952 Pivot and the Secret Failure of the Armed Forces Security Agency
Rapid organizational shifts from 1945 to 1952 buried the friction between the Army and the Pentagon, leaving a trail of redacted failures.
By Marcus Boone ·
James Clapper and the 1999 Blueprint for Digital Intrusion
Kept secret and heavily redacted, a 1999 report shifted the state's gaze from intercepted calls to the data resident on our computers, ending the era of digital sanctuary.
By Miriam Adler ·
Jerry Berman and the 1996 Battle to Lock the Internet
A South African engineer warned the Senate that the state was breaking the web's privacy to maintain its watch, a plea the FBI would systematically dismantle one month later.
By Marcus Boone ·
Guttman and the 1995 Blueprint for Federal Encryption
A 200-page guide to computer security served as the public face of a government struggle over encryption backdoors and state surveillance, kept under wraps until recently.
By Marcus Boone ·
NSA maintained Army reports on enemy intelligence and secret codes
Enemy agents were hunted and strategic secrets were guarded in files that remain partially blacked out by the National Security Agency.
By Harlan Pryce ·
NSA Cites Grave Damage to Shield USS Liberty Attack Secrets
Those who survived the torpedoes and strafing are left with redacted summaries while the Agency hides records that could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security.
By Miriam Adler ·
NSA Fails 10 Major Tests Amid Unjustifiable Global Collection
Global communications were swept up without justification while millions in assets vanished and internal watchdogs were rotated to protect their own future assignments.
By Marcus Boone ·
NSA Maps Secret Documents to Hunt Sources Who Risk Human Life
Sources who jeopardize covert operations or risk human life are hunted through a clinical process of mirroring public words against secret files before the agency notifies the Department of Justice.
By Miriam Adler ·
NSA gatekept government contracts by dictating which systems were trusted
Vendors had to submit to rigid agency standards to win deals, while the agency monitoring global communications wrote the rules for the hardware used.
By Miriam Adler ·