One of just three people working with the Black Chamber’s old records, one of the founders of the SIS, which Bamford reports was kept a secret from the State Department, was the mathematician Solomon Kullback. Just eight months after the Black Chamber was shuttered, the US, faced with the prospect of crippled spying capabilities in the increasingly unstable world of the 1930s, reformed the effort under the Army’s Signals Intelligence Service. The incident foreshadowed the 1975 Church Committee, which investigated surveillance abuses by American intelligence agencies, and the 2013 Snowden leaks, which exposed vast electronic surveillance capabilities that triggered a global reckoning. The Black Chamber was shut down amid scandal when US Secretary of State Henry Stimson found out the group was spying on American allies as well as foes. Understanding what will happen in the world tomorrow requires a mastery of the elements that will define it. Monitoring 5G successfully requires a deep understanding of what makes it fundamentally different from its predecessors: higher speed, lower range, more distribution nodes, different data protocols. 5G brings its own new challenges for collecting intelligence, Herrera explains. Herrera is hesitant to discuss specifics about what his directorate is zeroing in on, but when asked about the challenges of spying in a world of rapid technical advancement, he agrees and points to the emergence of 5G around the world. Historically, the NSA has been the single largest funder of academic quantum computing research, says Herrera. The highly publicized race to build the world’s best quantum computer is proof of this: both Google and IBM use the same basic building block in their machines to create quantum behavior, known as transmon qubits, which was invented under the directorate’s sponsorship. The directorate’s fingerprints now show up in the form of fundamental research advancing the field and even inside the most advanced computers built at giant tech firms. The directorate has been at the forefront of quantum computing research since 1995, immediately following the advent of Shor’s algorithm, which showed how quantum computers can factor numbers exponentially faster than normal computers-exactly the kind of work needed to break encryption. Technologies like quantum and 5G are part of that.” “It changes the kind of technology and access we need. “Great power competition drives the agenda,” says Herrera.

Powerful countries, companies, and universities are pouring money into the task of building a quantum computer powerful enough to perform exponentially faster than the computers of today. “Each generation of technology presents its new challenges.”įor example, the directorate has devoted significant resources toward mastering quantum computing, technology that has the potential to break the encryption used to protect sensitive data in the digital world of today and tomorrow. “Any time there's that kind of a shift, it's complex,” says Herrera. And it also changed the way the NSA operates. The companies that worked with them recoiled in embarrassment and anger. Meanwhile, the NSA is still recovering from a massive set of leaks published nine years ago about global and domestic surveillance programs that set off a firestorm of criticism and calls for reform and changed the average American’s perception of the NSA. The new world is a messier one, defined by an emerging era of great power competition among nations like the United States, China, and Russia. The United States’ quick turn as a lone superpower is over. The bipolar world of the Cold War belongs to the history books. Herrera takes the helm as the agency faces new challenges. And he explains why the rise of new technologies, in terms of both threat and opportunity, are at the heart of what his group must contend with. His priorities show how much the NSA’s targets are changing, balancing its work surveilling terror groups with an appreciation of how rapidly the geopolitical landscape has shifted in recent years.

In his first interview since getting the job, Herrera lays out the tech-and threats-his group will now be focusing on.

Surveillance by secret agents