Bin Laden Is Higher Tech Than U.S., Says NSA Chief

Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has better technology at his disposal than the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), which is charged with protecting the nation's information systems and providing foreign intelligence aimed at uncovering threats against the country, the director of the agency says in a television interview to be broadcast Tuesday night.

Bin Laden's superior technological capabilities helped him to mastermind the simultaneous 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, General Mike Hayden, head of the NSA, says in the interview to be broadcast on CBS's " 60 Minutes II" news show, according to reports from The Associated Press and Reuters news wires.

Bin Laden has been indicted in the bombings and allegedly has carried out a long-time global plot to kill Americans and wreck U.S. government property. He has said publicly that those are his goals. Four men said to have links to bin Laden currently are on trial in the bombing conspiracy case in New York federal court.

"Osama bin Laden has at his disposal the wealth of a $3 trillion a year telecommunications industry that he can rely on," the news wires quote Hayden as saying in the TV interview. "We are behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution."

The NSA is the country's top cryptologic group, using satellites; interceptions of telephone calls, e-mail, faxes, and radio transmissions; and other eavesdropping methods to detect threats to the United States. According to the NSA Web site, the agency is "a high technology organization ... on the frontiers of communications and data processing" and "remains a world leader in many technological fields."

But it also, apparently, has not kept pace with advances and has become vulnerable, including to failures that imperil its system, and by extension the nation, Hayden says in the interview. In January of last year, the agency suffered an information overload that took down all of the computers at its Maryland headquarters, leaving Americans worldwide vulnerable for three-and-a-half days.

"NSA headquarters was brain dead," Hayden says in the interview. "We had some residual ability at our locations around the world, but I don't want to trivialize this. This was really bad."

The system failure was kept secret because "the knowledge that we were down would increase the risk significantly to Americans around the world," he says.