The NSA's Actual Job Is Reading Signals, Not Running Spies. That's a Different Agency's Job — and Sixteen Others Each Have Their Own.
The US Intelligence Community isn't one agency doing "intelligence." It's eighteen legally separate organizations, each built around a specific domain — signals, human sources, imagery, satellites, finance, even the Coast Guard — coordinated but not commanded by a single office created in 2004. Understanding that split is what makes it possible to tell apart the three disciplines already covered in this cluster: chip-fabrication trust, emissions trust, and aggregate-signature trust.
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