Report: NSA In Dire Straits

The super-secret National Security Agency has long been the eyes and ears of the U.S. government, able to intercept all sorts of transmissions and protect American communications.

But an article in this week's New Yorker by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour Hersh raises important questions about the agency's effectiveness, claiming the NSA has fallen behind in communications technology, possibly putting American security at risk.

Hersh has been covering national security issues for 30 years, and his article includes the first-ever on-the-record interview with the NSA's head. Hersh spoke with Early Show Co-Anchor Jane Clayson.

"I guess you could say, 'it's the Internet, stupid.' Because of the Internet and because of the ability we have to encrypt our transmissions Â… the NSA, which has been so good during the Cold War at intercepting the Russians and other potential enemies' signals, simply can't get to and read some of the transmissions that go around the world."

How did the NSA lose its grip on the information age?

"Hey, it's telecommunications. There's so much. There's millions of sat-com phone calls from the Middle East, where we're looking for terrorists, would-be terrorists. How do you sort it out? There's too much. We don't have the software."

Hersh says the American government faces has the same problem as Microsoft, or anybody else running a Web site: "It's simply trying to access the information."

In fact, he says if the NSA were able to filter through all that traffic, international terrorists like Osama Bin Laden would not be able to stay in hiding, is that correct?

"That's my theory. Basically, it's a crisis that's been coming for 10 or 12 years. It's been coming and we know it's a potential issue. One of the things I do in the article is repeat a lot of the problems, criticism from inside the agency about management. There's a lot of problems there."

Hersh says the problems at the NSA leave the U.S. vulnerable. "This great source of information we've had all during the Cold War, which has been to monitor the secret conversations of our adversaries and friends, as I say, is pretty much out of business."

He points to a recent example of how NSA failures threatened U.S. security.

"A year-and-a-half ago, there was the famous secret test in India. It stunned the world by conducting three nuclear tests in May of 1998. The CIA took a lot of heat for missing it, and we did miss it. It was pretty dumb of us. What happened was the NSA was not able to monitor the signals at the test site and know they were preparing secretly

What will it take to turn the NSA around?

"I don't know. There's a new director. An Air Force general named Michael Hayden who understands the problem. The civilian leadership has been o powerful, another general comes in every three years and retires. The senior leadership call those people 'the summer help.' It's pretty arrogant and it doesn't want to change."

He says Hayden faces a choice between gathering effective information now and taking time out to modernize the agency.

"The tradeoff is simple Â… it's either spending a couple billion dollars to hire the people and set up an institute and begin to do the research to see if you can beat the problem. And in order to do that, he's got to stop collecting intelligence."