What Happens in the University of Maryland NSA Facility Where Edward Snowden Worked?

The Center for Advanced Study of Language near the University of Maryland, College Park.<a href="http://www.casl.umd.edu/">UMD.edu</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Since the Guardian revealed Edward Snowden as the source behind its explosive scoops on National Security Agency surveillance, media outlets have been picking over the details of the whistleblower’s life, everything from his stint in community college to the identity of his abandoned girlfriend. Here’s another small detail about his background that intrigued some people: “[H]e got his first job in an NSA facility, working as a security guard for one of the agency’s covert facilities at the University of Maryland.” Some reporters were surprised to learn that the University of Maryland had a “covert” NSA facility operating somewhere on or near the school grounds. (The NSA itself is headquartered in nearby Fort Meade, Maryland.)

On Sunday, the Diamondback, the university’s student newspaper, noted: “Which facility and exactly where it was Snowden worked is unknown, but the NSA has connections to several university facilities, including the Laboratory for Physical Sciences, the Office of Technology Commercialization and the Lab for Telecommunication Science.” Later, the university confirmed that in 2005 Snowden worked for less than a year as a “security specialist” for the NSA-linked Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), which serves as a research center for the intelligence community.

The research done at CASL ranges from cultural and linguistic studies to work on “spycraft” technology (click here to read a rundown of the Center’s language research, published in the NSA’s quarterly online journal). One neuroscience project reportedly focused on filling in the blanks of incomplete texts, such as documents from corrupted hard drives or intercepted communications. “CASL’s cognitive neuroscience team has been studying the cognitive basis of working memory’s capacity for filling in incomplete areas of text,” a CASL document reads. “They have made significant headway in this research by using a powerful high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) machine acquired in 2006.” Another project involved training subjects to control their own brain-wave activity.

The university administration has touted its NSA partnership. “In support of the nation’s critical need for increased language capabilities, this Center will conduct groundbreaking research in areas such as language acquisition, contextual analysis of language, and human computer interaction and computer translation, and become the largest center for language study in the world,” C.D. Mote, Jr., former president of the university, announced in September 2003.

The relationship between the agency and the school, which goes well beyond the Center for Advanced Study of Language, has been well-documented. For instance, a 1997 issue of Connections, the university’s electrical and computer engineering magazine, included a feature on the “National Security Agency’s Laboratory for Physical Sciences and Maryland,” which is described as a “partnership that pushes the limits of technology.” (The laboratory is located adjacent to the College Park campus.) Here’s an excerpt from the item:

Although the current building is but five years old, the university’s association with LPS actually dates back to the 1950’s-shortly after President Harry Truman established the NSA… [T]he Scientific Advisory Board advised the NSA to enact an open partnership with a prestigious university and conduct collaborative, unclassified research across the fields of physical science that influence technological advances in communications and computers. As a result, the Laboratory for Physical Sciences was established, right next to the University of Maryland in College Park… After supporting 40 full years of uninterrupted collaboration, the NSA has steadfastly been pleased with the results.

The university would not comment on the nature of the work currently done at this laboratory.

As fascinating as this might be, there’s nothing scandalous or particularly unusual about the NSA’s partnering with the University of Maryland. The NSA has, as do other American intelligence agencies, including the CIA, a long history of collaborating with universities across the country. “Because of the nature of what the agency does, and their necessity to be on the cutting edge of computer science, it [is] required for them to have pretty close ties to academics and computer research centers,” says John Prados, a senior research fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The NSA maintains a roster of recommended “centers of academic excellence” (meaning they have commendable programs in teaching information assurance), which, in addition to the University of Maryland, includes Anne Arundel Community College—where Snowden sporadically took classes before taking a job at the university’s NSA facility.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate