NSA from the start

More from the latest History Today.

Courier services have always been around. Governments have used groups of runners or horsemen to carry official or commercial documents. The modern post office began in Italy in the 1500s, when the Tassis family organized a series of offices around Europe, serving the various duchies and kingdoms of Italy and France plus the Vatican.

Some elements of this 1600s post office haven’t changed at all. The US post office still uses sorting cases, and the carriers still use leather satchels with shoulder straps. Lobbies had fountain pens with inkwells until 1960 when they switched to ballpoints.

The Tassis family grew rich, and part of their wealth came from spying and blackmail. Tassis offices invented techniques to quickly mold a matching stamp** from the impression on the wax seal. They broke the seal, read the document, and resealed it with the copy of the original stamp. When governments tried to work around the Tassis monopoly, Tassis found ways to defeat the workarounds. A government used commercial ships to carry some of its mail outside Tassis channels, so Tassis simply rented the ships and ran their spy services on board.

The Tassis spy rooms were called Black Chambers by the victims. Later, of course, newer technologies reinvented the Black Chamber with the same name and the same blackmail tendencies. The US version was started in 1917 by Yardley, who followed the cult/blackmail model and also invented new tech. The NSA directly descends from Yardley and repeats the Tassis model. It developed the default global courier system, uses it for spying and blackmail, and invents technologies to defeat every possible workaround.

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** The methods of electrotyping reinvented this tech.