National Security Agency

Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom Friday was nominated as the new director of the super-secret National Security Agency. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger announced that President Reagan had made the nomination, which now goes to the Senate for confirmation. Odom, 52, replaces Air Force Lt. Gen. Lincoln Faurer, who retired April 1 after almost 35 years of service, four of them as head of the NSA.

An Internet rights group filed suit Tuesday against AT&T, accusing the long-distance telephone giant of violating federal privacy laws by helping the National Security Agency monitor calls and e-mail as part of its recently disclosed domestic spying operation.

What a relief to hear the White House, Vice President George Bush, the National Security Agency, and the CIA deny being a cahoots with Panamanian panjandrum, Gen. Manuel A. Noriega. Reading the raft of reports coming out of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics, and international operations, I was starting to worry. Were Reagan Administration zealots getting carried away again by their obsession with doing in the Nicaraguan government? If so, paragons of purity that they are, then they'd surely fess up to playing footsie with Noriega and his ilk. Well, wouldn't they?

Citing national security, a federal judge in Chicago threw out a lawsuit aimed at blocking AT&T Corp. from giving telephone records to the government for use in the war on terrorism. "The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said.

Burdened by a bloated and expensive work force, the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence services must make deeper cuts in personnel and invest in new technology or their mission could be "seriously jeopardized," a federal commission said Friday. NSA, which eavesdrops on foreign communications; the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency have been ordered by Congress to reduce their civilian personnel 24% by the year 2001.

William E. Odom, 75, a retired Army lieutenant general who was a senior military and intelligence official in the Carter and Reagan administrations, died May 30 of an apparent heart attack at his vacation home in Lincoln, Vt., family members said. A career officer, Odom was a scholar of international relations and a leading authority on the Soviet Union. He was the military assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor and director of the National Security Agency during President Reagan's second term.

Cyber security is a real issue, as evidenced by the virus behind July 4 cyber attacks that hobbled government and business websites in the United States and South Korea. It originated from Internet provider addresses in 16 countries and targeted, among others, the White House and the New York Stock Exchange. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has chosen to combat it in a move that runs counter to its pledge to be transparent.