NSA HQ Home of Crypto Cat™, Decipher Dog™, Rosetta Stone, Slate, Joules, T.Top, and CSS Sam

If you are curious to know what it looks like from the air, Cryptome has some remarkable images of the NSA headquarters, in Maryland AKA "The Puzzle Palace". They were taken in 2005 as part of a project by Anne Arundel County to develop and maintain a seamless county wide GIS base data set. EarthData is providing a county wide imagery base layer which will enable the county to extract valuable information from in order to accomodate their resource planning and GIS efforts. Ultimately there is a need for having geospatial data immediately available and easily accessible in order to provide geographic reference for Federal, State, and local emergency responders, as well as for homeland security efforts. (We guess the 2 planes top left are static displays at the gates)

"digital natural-color orthophotography was collected during April 2005 leaf-off conditions at a resolution of 20 centimeters to obtain a pixel resolution of 6 inches for all final orthos. The imagery was flown at approximately 6,300 ft AMT with a 30% sidelap. " "Accuracy is better than ASPRS Class 1 standards for 1 inch equals 100 ft scale orthophotography with a horizontal accuracy of plus or minus 1 foot."

Micrososft Virtual Earth will give you birds Eye views on "Local Live" of the same site here which you can virtually fly around - at much lower resolution. (The car park is full as well)

The NSA employs mathematicians, linguists, engineers, and computer scientists focus on two core missions: Information Assurance-codemaking, and Signals Intelligence-codebreaking. NSA's missions depend on the expertise of a joint military and civilian workforce. These codemakers and codebreakers have been inventing new technology, preventing conflict, shortening wars, and saving lives since 1952.

NSA have a handy Kids Page "CryptoKids™ America's Future Codemakers & Codebreaker" ..."learn all about codes and ciphers, play lots of games and activities, and get to know each of us - Crypto Cat™, Decipher Dog™, Rosetta Stone, Slate, Joules, T.Top, and, of course, our leader CSS Sam."

Without NSA/CSS, they wouldn’t be able to talk to one another without the bad guys listening and they wouldn’t be able to figure out what the bad guys were planning.

We hope you have lots of fun learning about cryptology and NSA/CSS. You might be part of the next generation of America’s codemakers and codebreakers.

C'mon kids and help us beat the BAD GUYS y'know, by illegal * warrantless surveillance with wire taps on John Doe's phone lines.

* President Bush authorised the NSA to eavesdrop on US domestic electronic communications in early 2002 under the so called Terrorist Surveillance Program. By doing this he acted illegally by deliberately circumventing the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) , requiring the government to seek a warrant from an intelligence court before it can spy on Americans.