George R. Cotter, who served as the NSA’s chief scientist until 2009, liked to describe the division of labor in signals intelligence as “Fetch It, Etch It and Retch It.” Fetching happened in acquisition, or S3 on the organization chart, where the first stage of spying took place. Thousands of workers reached into cables and routers and networks around the world to extract information that belonged to someone else. Etching was the domain of S2, analysis and production, where thousands of others filtered and looked for meaning in the raw intercepts. Retching, in Cotter’s irreverent phrase,
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