NSA’s GitHub Account Open-Sources 32 Internal Projects To The Public
National Security Agency (NSA), a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, which is known for its secretive operations and likes to be keep its work private, has now gone public with a handful of their projects through its own official GitHub page.
This is not the first time that NSA has opened its door to the general public. The first time it made its public presence feel was when it opened its own Twitter account in December 2013 following Edward Snowden’s revelation about its surveillance programs. Since then, NSA has been openly sharing the news about its projects through social media, thereby increasing its presence with the general public.
The intelligence agency is known for employing genius level coders and mathematicians for the purpose of breaking codes, collecting digital information of everyone and also to defend the country against cyber warfare. NSA’s GitHub account has listed 32 different open-source projects written by its developers whose code repositories have been shared under the NSA Technology Transfer Program (TTP) across two accounts. In other words, the main NSA page has 11 different repositories, and its Information Assurance group has a separate GitHub page with 21 more repositories. Other projects are listed on the agency’s TTP as coming soon.
Not all projects listed are new. For instance, the security module for the SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) has been part of the Linux kernel for years. Further, the agency has also stated that it will soon finish uploading each and every projects listed under the free software license Apache 2.0, reports The Next Web, who was the first to spot NSA’s page on GitHub.
This is not the first time that the NSA has made use of its GitHub accounts created in 2015. The agency back then had open sourced a tool called SIMP (System Integrity Management Platform) to share their internal projects with the software community at large.
With the NSA making it to the code repository platform and sharing their technologies with other coders, opens up opportunity for them to interact with them and potentially recruit talent. In fact, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is another American Intelligence agency, too uses Twitter to connect with the general masses.
You can check out the NSA’s page here.
