R.K.: Okay. What I really wanted to get into was that during our dinner you talked about how there is a kind of a pathology there. That there is a mindset, a culture that is really screwed up.
T.D.: Well, you know -
R.K.: Let's hear about that.
T.D.: A pathology doesn't mean that you can't function, there are very high functioning organizations in terms of their institution. The pathology is that the mindset was, and I can speak directly to this, remember I am the first to tell you, there is much about NSA from my own experience that is completely legit.
Assuming that they're following the law, abiding by the constitution and even in terms of foreign intelligence that it has a purpose, you're actually collecting information that pertains to a real threat that might harm Americans or others. The reality is that increasingly as the decades went by, but particularly as we moved in to the latter, the end years of the Cold War and moving in to the nineties, as the idea was it would be totally fair game, and of course part of this was advances in technology, you have to remember it was a huge shift, it was a sea change and most people still do not appreciate this.
Going from what I call the industrial era of telecommunications, the industrial era of radio transmissions, the industrial era literally defined as circuit based switches, meaning push to talk, plain old telephone system we always joked it was hot, right? You pick up the receiver and you actually have to have to do a dial, you literally dialed, there wasn't pulse, you literally had to dial, I still remember and I am not that old as a young kid any time I picked up the phone I had to literally dial a number. I just didn't push buttons. We forget that there was a huge sea change because of technology.
The invention of the integrated circuit, the 8-Bit computer era which I consider the golden era which is the era which I grew up and that's when I had my first computer was an Atari 8-Bit home computer. That's what I learned on. That's what I taught myself Basic, the programming language and became absolutely fascinated with the technology.
It's also the period in which I saw the transitioning having flown on one of the last flights of the analog based RC-135 to the computer assisted RC 135 and it was a dramatic shift in technology. It came later to others but you're going from circuit based switched to packet based switches and that's the difference between analog and digital. Huge sea change!
NSA has developed an entire edifice, an entire legacy infrastructure that was dedicated to the industrial age model or the industrial age of telecommunications. They simply were not ready or prepared; and that mindset was in error by the way, that was far simpler in terms of just keeping track of everything. All of the sudden they're now dealing in the nineties with the extraordinary expansion of the internet and the digital age.
Vast amounts of data on a scale, literally several orders, mathematically at least two to three orders of magnitude more than they ever dealt with before. I mean just extraordinary amounts of information. And so they just could not keep up and this was something NSA actually knew. That's why I said they would analyze their navel. They well understood based on both external and internal studies what the challenge was.
The challenge they had was cultural and that challenge was they continued to rest on the laurels of the industrial age model. Literally and figuratively even in terms of the technology and were simply un-willing to change in a way that would ensure their relevance going into the twenty first century.
Now you combine that with that struggle, where management was not a competency, you're now having to deal with a new world and it's also post Cold War, it was sort of the perfect storm and at the same time they were making leadership decisions in which instead of actually building and inventing and exploring, being imaginative enough, having instead the failure of imagination which is what the 9/11 Commission said of the entire government in terms of not preventing 9/11, which was a bit of a misnomer by the way.
It wasn't so much as a failure of imagination, they just didn't want to imagine it was the "not invented here" syndrome, but ironically enough the solution was let's spend big bucks on big programs and that will solve it because that's the industrial age model. When in doubt, throw a lot of money at it, you'll eventually arrive at a solution. My first exposure to that was actually in the late eighties when I ended up becoming part of what was then the largest single automated data processing program that NSA had ever entered into with a contractor and that was GTE which no longer exists. They used to basically have most of the rural payphones by the way...
R.K.: Wait; we're talking about technology but when we were at dinner today you said that there was an institutionalized pathology, what was that about? What were you talking about there?
T.D.: Well institution pathology is when you're doing intelligence because your job was to ferret it out it didn't matter how you got it, you just took it. You just grabbed it. It was fair game and this is how the organization ultimately was structured and because you were primarily dealing with the Soviet, the communist threat, guess how you ultimately structured your organization? It ends up looking like the very threat you're trying to understand. And so the pathology is in the mind, and it's secret. Remember that this is a secret society. You end up becoming incredibly incestuous with your selves and the evolution of your organization. I mention this because my self and about a dozen others are dropped in to this culture.
R.K.: Right.
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