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From: rjr@mgweed.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: The Puzzle Palace
Message-ID: <3825@mgweed.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 30-Sep-83 12:48:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: mgweed.3825
Posted: Fri Sep 30 12:48:58 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Oct-83 07:19:13 EDT
Organization: Western Electric - Montgomery Illinois
Lines: 16

There is a book (non-fiction) out called "The Puzzle Palace".

It tells all about the goings-on in the NSA (National Security Agency).
Towards the end of the book they mention the NSA's involvement with
the NBS data encryption standard and how they insisted that it be reduced
from 128 to 64 fields (if that's the correct term), otherwise it would
take the NSA forever to decode someone's traffic. Cutting it in half
reduced the time from days or weeks down to a couple of minutes, as I recall,
even using their super-duper computer.

The book is quite interesting. For example it tells how NSA built satellite
receive sites close to other sites so they could monitor all traffic. It
tells about the monitoring equipment "we" had in Iran to monitor Russian
space launches. Basically it says the NSA is paranoid about being able to
monitor/influence ANY communications.....