Black Chambers and Secret Services

Authors: Ploner Greta & Verant Katja

Secret services – details you didn’t know about them

Black Chamber and Secret Services are common topics in the medias but nobody really knows something about them and now we would like to explain it you.

Black Chamber was the first cryptographic institution in the USA and a forerunner of the National Security Agency. She was founded by Herbert Yardley after the end of the First World War. They wanted to crack the secret messages between other nations. Their most important success was during the Washington Naval Conference when they achieved to break the secret messages of the Japanese. Ten years after the foundation the Secretary of State Stimson remarked: „Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Besides, he didn’t want to finance it anymore and so they closed down the Black Chamber. In the 17thcentury were founded also in Europe some Black Chambers which opened, read and resealed the secret messages. One of the most famous Black Chambers was the “Geheime Kabinettskanzlei” in Vienna.

The “Geheime Kabinettskanzlei” had to change many times its name because it was very
secret. They read letters secretly, deciphered, copied them and often falsified the information. In 1848 it was closed down by the reason of the political change in Europe.

On the other hand,MI6 – “Military Intelligence, Section 6” still exists since 1909 with its head office in London. It is a British intelligence agency which supplies the British government with foreign intelligence. MI6 was specialised for the marine and now for foreign espionage and is the foreign intelligence service of the SIS. In the First World War they wanted to collapse the Russian Regime but they didn’t succeed.
The most famous secret service in the USA is the NSA – “National Security Agency”, the American foreign intelligence service. It was founded in 1952 and has its head office in Maryland, USA. Almost nothing was known about it until Edward Snowden published information and details about this agency. NSA is responsible for worldwide control, decipherment and analysis of electronic communication.

Sources:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geheime_Kabinettskanzlei

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Chamber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Intelligence_Service

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/nsa

http://www.secretservice.gov/

https://www.sis.gov.uk/