The National Security Agency, whose Cold War research into code breaking and electronic eavesdropping spurred the American computer revolution, has become a victim of the high-tech world it helped to create. Through mismanagement, arrogance, and fear of the unknown, the senior military and civilian bureaucrats who work at the agency's headquarters, in suburban Fort Meade, Maryland, have failed to prepare fully for today's high-volume flow of E-mail and fibre-optic transmissions -- even as nations throughout Europe, Asia, and the Third World have begun exchanging diplomatic and national-security messages encrypted in unbreakable digital code. The N.S.A.'s failures don't make the headlines...
Last month, General Hayden agreed to speak to me, at his unpretentious top-floor offices at Ops 2, the N.S.A. headquarters building. He is an affable spymaster, who laughs easily, offers no slogans, and promises no quick fixes... "The issue is not people but external changes. For the N.S.A., technology is a two-edged sword... In its forty-year struggle against Soviet Communism," Hayden noted, "the N.S.A. was thorough, stable, and focussed." Then he asked "What's changed?" and he answered, "All of that."

I am astonished at the failures of our intelligence community over the-- last decade in particular. We failed to predict the demise of the Soviet Union. We failed to predict the Indian nuclear test in 1998. We bombed a Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. We failed to detect the five year planning cycle of al Qaeda, the operatives who conducted 9/11. And we failed in terms of predicting Iraq's WMDs. So we have a significant problem in this nation with our intelligence community.

The nation was tightly webbed in a net of interlocking data-channels, and a time-traveler from a century ago would have been horrified by the degree to which confidential information had been rendered accessible to total strangers capable of adding two plus two.

It was doubtful that their technology, and its intelligent use, would ever match their ability to create social stupidities.

"After the 11 September attack," March editorializes one morning, "amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line — who knows, maybe even the CIA's scared of them."

0.1% of all telecommunications on this planet are absorbed by the NSA’s artificial intelligence. What then happens with them, no one knows. As a rule, orders for secrecy are lifted only after 30 years. Perhaps they will no longer be necessary at all three decades from now. The Word that was in the Beginning is vanishing into computer data banks anyway. When all that is said by the inhabitants of the earth has disintegrated into bits, Alan Turing's Universal Discrete Machine will be perfected.

Over the last twenty years, the worldwide net had come to be a midden of bogus sites and recursive fraudulence…telling truth from fantasy was often the hardest thing about using the web.

Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare.

No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axl's service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-70s be had for a few coppers from the Washington Post. We could have resented this sometimes, if we had smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in Aviation Weekly the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again.

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.

We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.

Threats are evolving quickly, from hypersonics to cyber attacks to the re-emergence of great power competition. In other words, the world we live in today differs from the threat assessments that underpinned Strong, Secure, Engaged in 2017

We used to think that secrecy was perhaps the greatest enemy of democracy, and as long as there was no suppression or censorship, people could be trusted to make the informed decisions that would preserve our free society, but we have learned in recent years that the techniques of misinformation and misdirection have become so refined that, even in an open society, a cleverly directed flood of misinformation can overwhelm the truth, even though the truth is out there, uncensored, quietly available to anyone who can find it.