National Cryptologic Museum, Maryland

The National Cryptologic Museum is located just outside the gates of the National Security Agency (NSA), an organization that employs tens of thousands of people in the daunting task of intercepting, decoding, and classifying communications all over the world for the American intelligence community. The museum represents an interesting display dichotomy: a display site built by an organization that would rather no one knew it existed, that describes the operations of the organization, operations that are, however, secret, and are, paradoxically, about revealing secrets. The NSA has partially addressed this problem by dwelling on well known historical elements of its story, such as the cracking of World War Two codes with the Enigma machine, which is prominently featured in the museum, with many other historic analog code-breaking instruments that look like alien typewriters. The museum does have a number of more contemporary displays, such as a finger print analyzing computer that visitors can rate the quality of their prints on, and several computer and supercomputer systems that, with little explanation of how they were used, are beautifully enigmatic icons of the age of information and intelligence. For example, a computer called the CM-5 is an elegant bathroom-sized machine clad in horizontal and vertical metal fins, like a giant architectural model of a modernist skyscraper. There is an array of flickering rack-mounted components called the Rissman Telemetry Processing System, that has a satisfying assortment of milspec switches. A Cray XMP-24 supercomputer (the kind with the built-in padded bench around its base), looks like a Stanley Kubrick film prop, but is labeled as having been in use at NSA circa 1985-1993. And a Ziegler supercomputer machine (called Barney by its handlers, because it was big and purple), which weighs several tons, was cooled by a 60 ton refrigeration unit (all to process 32 gigabytes), and is labeled as having been in use at the NSA from 1993 to 2000.