The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. Responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for intelligence and counterintelligence, the agency is known for its secrecy.
Tasked with the protection of U.S. communication and information system, the NSA employs programmers, coders and researchers and mathematicians of different sorts in order to break codes, gather information, and defend the country against digital threats..
While the NSA prefers to work in the dark, since Edward Snowden leaked its data with several of his revelations, it gradually made its public presence. For example, a few years prior, the agency has opened a Twitter account.
And on June 2017, it opened a GitHub account. The agency has shared some code repositories under the NSA Technology Transfer Program (TTP). As of the announcement, the account has 32 open source projects for people to use.
"The technologies listed below were developed within the National Security Agency (NSA) and are now available to the public via Open Source Software (OSS)," said the agency on its page. "The NSA Technology Transfer Program (TTP) works with agency innovators who wish to use this collaborative model for transferring their technology to the commercial marketplace. OSS invites cooperative development of technology, encouraging broad use and adoption. The public benefits by adopting, enhancing, adapting, or commercializing the software. The government benefits from the open source community’s enhancements to the technology."
With the NSA having its own GitHub account, it is seen that the agency known for its secrecy, is becoming more open.
What's more, this is the start where the agency is making its way from defense and intelligence to the be better known in public. And using GitHub, the agency can engage with coders, programmers and others, to clear its image and potentially recruit talents.
This isn't the first time the NSA has been involved with GitHub. The agency has in fact been running a technology transfer program for years, which aims to move its in-house developed codes to the software community at large. Its Information Assurance Directorate for example, has established a GitHub page in 2013. H
