Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union

Nice read

poor! not as per description of the product

fast delevery, very satisfy

This book is seriously good, if you are into post-war spooks, crypto and the like, Not a lot written elsewhere about this. The writer goes into the moral morass you get into if you start reading other peoples mail, and the consequences to your very soul!. Also describes, how NSA failed to read several RUSSIAN 10-rotor machines (ALBATROSS, FIALKA) and thus went down the dirty road to reading all un-encrypted stuff, ending up scooping up all of it (yours and mine),and the corruption of the politicians and government. -that they could never go back to being honest.Only brief on VENONA, described elsewhere, but focuses on NSA in the fifties and sixties, Very interesting revelations about Vietnam tactical sigint , Gulf of Tonkin and Tet. -recent disclosures re-write the history books there. A very good story, well told too.

As he points out the areas in which our Government (NSA, CIA, Navy, Army, FBI) screwed up, it surprises me that the Government has what little respect it has.Right now the media is full of Government intelligence saying Russia hacked the Democratic Party emails causing Trump to win. Note they are not saying that the information published by Wikileaks is inaccurate, but that the Big Russian Bear did it to interfere with the election. Wikileaks says they didn't get the emails from Russia or any other government agency. -- You are, of course, welcome to believe whomever you wish. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says a 14 year-old could have hacked Podesta's emails -- He used the word password" as his password.They also have been saying that the Russians attempted to hack into an electrical utility. This is based on some kind of signatures embedded in the hacking software. It now appears that whoever did this hacking used a commercially available software package.My only real problem lies in the fact that the books stops too early. The ads for it say that the book "offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations." I suppose that that's true, but it really doesn't say much about Snowden. He's only mentioned in the introduction. Nor, of course, is the aftermath of Snowden's actions discussed. But then again, those aren't all known yet. Neither is the final resolution of the "Russian Hacking" scandal.I guess that my "crucial perspective" is to believe that those guys are not telling the "truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The real question is, are they lying or simply incompetent.

This is a remarkably accurate history of US signals intelligence. The only flaw was the now-mandatory cheap shot at an agency doing what it is tasked to do by the country's political leadership. Apparently people prefer to think that the US intelligence community runs rogue operations than to face the fact that more often than not they resist pressure from the White House to do things that are illegal. Still, well worth the read even for someone who has been on the inside.

A broad exploration of what happened to the American code-breaking fraternity following the successes of World War Two when inventive and subtle intellect not only broke the Japanese diplomatic and military codes, but also contributed in no small way to the British efforts at Bletchley Park against German Engima and Secret Writer coding machines.These success were to leave a legacy that soon revealed itself as far from ideal as the world evolved into an armed stand-off between the United States and its Allies and the communist Soviet led bloc. A period when the accumulation of intelligence by the US became heavily biased towards what could be gained by listening to the air waves and trying to extract the meaning by tackling the coded output. Inhibiting this effort was far too much bureaucratic infighting between the main competing agencies, the CIA and the NSA, that was not addressed for several decades. A complication furthered by a failure to develop new methods as the world, in this particular instance mainly the Soviet Union and its satellites, introduced codes and ciphers that defied reading. Inevitably even today the successes tend to be hidden behind understandable secrecy so the book does tend to have a negative slant towards the mistakes and bungling that pervades these years. This is not meant to imply criticism, it just turns out that way in telling the story.Following the revelations of Edward Snowden of how the NSA morphed towards devoting too much resource to looking at Americans makes this book well worth reading to get a handle of how we arrived at this point, noting how necessary adjustments taken in good faith became mixed with abuse of power by certain Presidents leading to it becoming the norm. A norm out of step with American ideals.