I’ve been threatening to take Lisa to the National Cryptologic Museum for many years now. But I always got the impression that dragging her to America’s foremost museum dedicated to applied mathematics and signals intelligence might not be what she really wanted to do when in our nation’s capital. So I never pushed too hard.

But today my conference took an overly technical turn, and I felt the need to get out early. Two years ago in San Jose I walked around its small cultural district at such quiet moments, finding many pleasant surprises. Last year, I had all of the SOMA and Tenderloin districts in San Francisco to keep me occupied. But very little is around the Raytheon offices in Largo, Maryland, and I didn’t have enough time to go into DC and back up to Baltimore before my flight. So I headed up the Parkway to Fort Meade, the home of the NSA.

I was in Maryland for the HDF and HDF-EOS Workshop X — that’s “X” as in “ten” not “eXtreme.” NASA sponsors the event to encourage usage of the “Hierarchical Data Format” and to share the experiences of data vendors and users. Very, very sexy stuff.

As the EOS name implies, a lot of the data comes from looking at Earth from space via satellites. Some of the science behind these projects has military applications, and some of the data can be “tasked” for various things that people can’t talk to me about and frankly I’m not sure I want to know — who am I kidding, I’m an equal opportunity information connoisseur. The freakier the application the more I want to know. (The best new thing I’ve heard bits about involves looking for nuclear explosions . . . by detecting small, predictable ground deformations . . . from space. Rest assured, I know no classified information.)

So after an enjoyable Wednesday evening sharing stories with the guy from Mitre, the NASA software engineer, the Russian materials scientist, and the businessman, I figured that I needed to see the cryptologic museum if I had the time.

This museum is wierd. Not wierd like the Mütter Museum or charmingly wacky like the National Farm Toy Museum. No this is through-the-looking-glass wierd.

It started on the way to the parking lot as the road passes the NSA headquarters, a large shiny black-box that absorbs information and reflects nothing. It could be any other corporate building except for the barbed wire and cameras and officers and security gates and radio equipment and decomissioned spy planes and the utter spotlessness of it all. The parking lot was just as strange. One bus had middle school students. Another had very well-dressed future bureaucrats about my age. A car from Pennsylvania pulled up and two soldiers in camoflauge piled out.

Inside the door a sign shouts “UNCLEARED FACILITY: NO CLASSIFIED TALK. REMOVE BADGES.” Is this a museum to honor cyphers and decryption gadgets like the Nazi’s Enigma device and the heavy-duty supercomputers that decode your e-mails and harvest the web looking for al-Qaeda plots and (possibly) industrial secrets leaving the country? Or is it a memorial to the hundred-or-so NSA employees (some civilians but mostly military) who sadly died in the service of gathering other people’s secrets? Or is it a cynical attempt to put a shiny face on the NSA? The answer is, of course, “yes” to all of these questions.

The museum has answers but even more secrets. If the most powerful civilian supercomputers top out at over 250,000,000,000,000 operations per second, how much horsepower does the NSA have? (If you must ask why anyone would need that much computing power, it takes a lot of juice to sequence the human genome or simulate a nuclear explosion or find the right words in phone conversations or decrypt secret e-mails.) What information was the USS liberty gathering when it was torpedoed by the Israelis in 1967 off the coast of Egypt? Were the women who ran the cryptanalytic bombes in WWII doing sophisticated work or just spinning dials and feeding papers? (Does it matter?)

“Is this the official museum of the NSA?” The retired-NSA employee who now answers tourist questions thought for an overly long time.

“The NSA runs the museum, so I guess you could say that.” Oh. My. God! There’s another, classified NSA museum “inside the fence.” A few minutes later I overheard him tell someone else that the museum opened in 1993, though the public was only admitted the next year. The very idea of a classified museum just boggles the mind.

In the museum gift shoppe, which was selling NSA Christmas tree ornaments and CryptoKids T-shirts, I asked the clerk whether there was a public walkway to the park containing the surveillance airplanes at the edge of the NSA parking lot. A few minutes later I was standing in the National Vigilance Park after calling Lisa to surprise her that I was at the NSA. She told me to stay out of trouble. (I have a bad habit of taking the wrong turn and getting directions from men with their hands on their sidearms.) I used my cellphone to snap a few pictures of the place. (See next post.)

500+ miles later, at the break in my Perl class this evening, a fellow student and I were talking about his job at General Dynamics. So do you make bombs? “Uh . . . no.” Another overly long pause. Somehow a minute later we were talking about the NSA.

“Did you see the guys with the big guns pointing at you on the exit and the road to the NSA?” What!? No.

“You took pictures of the place? With your mobile phone? You shouldn’t have done that.”

So friends, if I’m not here tomorrow, you know where to start looking. Enjoy the pictures.