The NSA: A Recent History | Newsweek Scope

Underqualified for the Overrated
Christopher Hitchens 10/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
Alfred Nobel had one odd thing in common with Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and Marcus Garvey. He had the chance to read about his own death in the newspapers. It seems that he was so depressed by the emphasis that the obituarists laid on his pioneering work on dynamite—the WMD of its day—that he resolved at once to upgrade his real death notice by endowing an award for international peace.
DEFENSE
The Turf War Over Cyberwar
Mark Hosenball 4/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
The computer wizards at the national Security Agency's tightly guarded headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., think they know better than anyone just how vulnerable America is to a massive cyberattack. It's their job to monitor rogue activity on networks around the world. In recent years, hackers in Russia and China—possibly operating with government backing—have rummaged through U.S. and other Western data banks for sensitive information. Russia, in particular,has demonstrated a willingnessto wage cyberwarfare. It has launched hack attacks against uppity former Soviet satellites, including a blitz on Georgia last summer that knocked out its electronic banking system for 10 days, according to a NATO report obtained by NEWSWEEK.
THE NEW REALISM
Barack Obama Is No Jimmy Carter. He’s Richard Nixon.
Michael Freedman 4/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
Republicans have been trying to link Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter ever since he started his presidential campaign, and they're still at it. After Obama recently shook hands with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, GOP ideologue Newt Gingrich said the president looked just like Carter—showing the kind of "weakness" that keeps the "aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators" licking their chops.
EXCLUSIVE
Now We Know What the Battle Was About
Daniel Klaidman 12/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
It is one of the darkly iconic scenes of the Bush Administration. In March 2004, two of the president's most senior advisers rushed to a Washington hospital room where they confronted a bedridden John Ashcroft. White House chief of staff Andy Card and counsel Alberto Gonzales pressured the attorney general to renew a massive domestic-spying program that would lapse in a matter of days. But others hurried to the hospital room, too. Ashcroft's deputy, James Comey, later joined by FBI Director Robert Mueller, stood over Ashcroft's bed to make sure the White House aides didn't coax their drugged and bleary colleague into signing something unwittingly. The attorney general, sick and pain-racked from a rare pancreatic disease, rose up from his bed, gathering what little strength he had, and firmly told the president's emissaries that he would not sign their papers.
COVER STORY: JUSTICE
The Fed Who Blew the Whistle
Michael Isikoff 12/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
Thomas M. Tamm was entrusted with some of the government's most important secrets. He had a Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance, a level above Top Secret. Government agents had probed Tamm's background, his friends and associates, and determined him trustworthy.
The Editor’s Desk
Jon Meacham 10/25/2008 12:00:00 AM
Free advice is often worth what you pay for it, and it is funny how people who do not have a particular job are full of wisdom about how to do it. (You can apply the same point to, say, in-laws, marriage and child rearing.) In moments of impatience in the Oval Office, George H.W. Bush was said to have snapped, "If you're so smart, how come I'm the president of the United States?"