National Security Agency

The ability to understand foreign communications while protecting our own--a capability in which the United States leads the world--confers a unique competitive advantage. The skill to accomplish this is cryptology, the fundamental mission and core competency of NSA. Maintaining this global advantage requires preservation of a healthy cryptologic capability in the face of unparalleled technical challenges.

The SIGINT mission allows for an effective, unified organization and control of all the foreign signals collection and processing activities of the United States. SIGINT is a unique discipline with a long and storied past. SIGINT's modern era dates to World War II, and its use is believed to have directly contributed to shortening the war by at least one year. In its SIGINT role, NSA intercepts and analyzes foreign electromagnetic signals--many of them protected by codes, ciphers, and complex electronic, countermeasures--to produce intelligence information for decisionmakers and military commanders.

Just as control of industrial technology was key to military and economic power during the past two centuries, control of information technology will be vital in the decades ahead. INFOSEC professionals go to extraordinary lengths to make sure all classified and sensitive information that is stored or sent through US Government equipment remains impenetrable. As the world becomes more and more technology-oriented, the INFOSEC mission becomes increasingly challenging. The INFOSEC mission is driven to guarantee vital information by being the preferred provider of leadership, products, and services for NSA's customers and also to be innovative in seeking the technological advantages needed to succeed in the 21st Century.