Created by President Truman's top-secret order in the fall of 1952, the National Security Agency was a multibillion-dollar organization that operated totally in the “black” region of government, where only those who could prove a “need to know” were entitled to knowledge. (It was not until five years after its founding that a government document even acknowledged its existence.) The NSA's cryptographic mission is twofold: to maintain the security of government information and to gather foreign intelligence. The double-sided nature of its duty led the NSA to organize itself into two major divisions: Communications Security, or COMSEC, which tries to devise codes that cannot be broken, and Communications Intelligence, or COMINT, which collects and decodes information from around the world. (Since the latter function most often involves intercepting and interpreting electronic information, it is more broadly referred to as signals intelligence, or SIGINT.) Over the years the NSA has established a vast network of listening devices and sensors to gather signals from even the most obscure reaches of the globe, an operation that expanded beyond the planetary atmosphere when the satellite era began in the 1960s.