Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Soon after his appointment as US Secretary of State in 1929 Henry Stimson was shown several Japanese communications that had been intercepted and deciphered by the State Department’s small highly classified Cipher Bureau known informally as the Black Chamber. His immediate and violent reaction was that such subterfuge was ‘highly unethical’ and that the State Department could have nothing to do with it. The annual budget of $25000 was effectively cut off its six staff retrenched and the Black Chamber was forced to close. Writing in his memoirs some years later Stimson explained his firm belief that ?Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.’ Eighty years later the National Security Agency (NSA) is the successor to the Black Chamber. Its staff now number more than 30000 with a classified budget estimated at well over ten billion dollars. Created soon after the Second World War most Americans had never heard of it until the mid-1970s. (For decades its acronym was said to stand for ‘No Such Agency?) NSA activities were long the subject of hyperbolic speculation but a few years after the end of the Cold War a comparatively sober report to the European Parliament noted that all e-mail telephone and fax communications on