ELEX Cadets Visit NSA Headquarters

Eleven members of the Electronics Experimenters Club (ELEX) visited the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA) at Ft. Meade, Maryland. All had a chance to see how electrical and mechanical engineering skills are utilized by the nation's intelligence community, in pursuit of national security objectives. The NSA tour began with a visit to R2, NSA's Information Assurance research organization. R2 personnel briefed the cadets on current research efforts to defend information and technical infrastructure, as well as efforts to improve the science of information security. Next, the cadets visited the NSA's "supervisory control and data acquisition" (SCADA) simulation facility. SCADA is a system often used for controlling public works infrastructure such as water, sewer and electrical systems. In this facility, domestic and foreign allied SCADA infrastructures are simulated to develop defensive measures. Finally, the cadets received a technical demonstration from the NSA's Technical Vulnerabilities group, who demonstrated "bug sweeping" techniques to detect and defeat surveillance devices; the group then had the cadets hunt for bugs in a live test range using state-of-the-art NSA detection equipment. CDT Patula gave a custom-made ELEX challenge coin to leaders at each NSA organization.