World War II and the '80s campaign against the Mafia were big wins for electronic surveillance

[FarCenter]

Prior to WW II the US had little in the way of electronic surveillance and codebreaking capabilities. There is a famous quote by Henry Stimson, Secretary of War and Secretary of State at various times, that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail". What little capability we had was largely in the Office of Naval Intelligence, which had broken various Japanese cyphers.

During WW II the intercept and decoding of signals, as well as sending disinformation, were a huge success largely led by the British GCHQ. The US effort ramped up and provided a lot of technical and staff support for the effort. After the war, it became obvious that a major component of the cold war would be the intelligence battle and specifically the use of electronic surveillance. The NSA was set up to do the intercepts and code breaking, as well as to manage the deployment and operation of US cypher and electronic security means and countermeasures.

Law enforcement lagged in its use of electronic surveillance. I believe that FBI use of surveillance got a huge boost from the success of surveillance in the 1980s campaign against the Mafia. This involved telephone taps and telephone call billing data recording, but it also involved bugging of premises and outdoor venues. Some of the technical means may well have been derived from the FBIs counter espionage role.

This success led to a greater use of surveillance by domestic law enforcement, and the FBI and NSA began to coordinate efforts to limit the use of strong encryption and to get legal authority to broaden their authorization and capability to intercept communications. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act was passed in 1994 to ensure that the carriers could and would provide access to call details and content as requested.

The Patriot act expansion following 9/11/01 was only the latest in a long history of expanded electronic surveillance.

There is also undoubtedly a far reaching progam to install back doors in software and devices. Not all bugs are due to sloppy coding.

[melm00se]

1. in regards to your opening statement

you might want to google:

the black chamber
Harold Yardley
MI-8
OP-20-G

The USA's departure from active cryptographic analysis occurred in 1929 when the State Department withdrew it's financial support. While this drastically limited the funding available to cryptanalysis, it did not stop what passed for intelligence agencies at that time from continuing.

Also, just after the end of WWI, the old fashioned way of cracking codes and ciphers came to an abrupt end when Arthur Scheribus created/invented the device that would eventually be renamed "Enigma". This and the machines that followed (on both sides) forced code breakers to move from using the human brain MkI to break these codes to machines like the Polish "bombes" (or bombys depending upon the source) and various other analog computing devices. (Although stealing the other side's code books and exploiting the laziness of your enemy never hurt either).

The can read more about interwar cryptanalysis in Yardley's book "The American Black Chamber".