Learning from the Enemy: The Gunman Project (2007) [pdf]

As opposed to the US, which developed no eavesdropping methods or bugs at all.

"The GUNMAN project had a major impact on the intelligence community as a whole. It brought about a greater understanding of the thinking and operations in a totalitarian society. The community became more aware of the hostile electronic threat against the U.S. As <redacted> explained, "If any other agency such as CIA or the State Department had discovered the bug, this change would not have occurred because they would not have publicized the incident." NSA, however, briefed all levels of government to warn them of the danger. NSA was not out to assess blame; it took the problem-solving approach." (p. 17)

I stopped reading, copied the exact same text to post as a comment and see it's already at the top...

The word "totalitarian" is hyphenated, to make the line justified. Anyone else try to search for the phrase with a Ctrl-F, come up with zero, and jump to the conclusion that the spooks had redacted the document?

I should perhaps look into having my paranoia treated.

I was glad to learn that "The Thing" was apparently designed by Léon Theremin who invented in 1928 (!) the famous "electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin

For those too paranoid to open a .PDF from the NSA, several solid parts in the typewriter were replaced by solid-looking parts with embedded circuits and altered magnetic characteristics.

These circuits magnetically detected the motion of the arms that carried and moved the character ball. So non-printing keystrokes, like space, tab, and backspace, and the character that did not rotate the ball, '-', were not detectable. The circuits had a tiny buffer, so would transmit the detected characters as they were being typed. Early models used batteries. Later bugs diverted some of the AC mains power from the typewriter.

It is likely that a relay antenna was employed to increase the detection range of the transmitted signals, which used the same frequencies as local television broadcasts.

That's really about it. The bugs were largely undetectable without x-raying every single part in the typewriter, which is how they were eventually found.

(a) It's from their museum facility (if you ever get the chance to visit the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT)[1], not the NSA itself.

(b) It's a scan of a 30-year-old report on a completed project, redacted heavily. Nothing more.

(c) If they want your inside leg measurement they've got better ways to find it without feeding you a PDF they overtly created.

[1] Where else will you find a teaching exhibit for visiting schoolkids that lets them cypher a message on a no-shit four rotor WW2 German Enigma machine, hand it to a friend, and watch them decrypt it on another Engima machine at the other side of the room? (Hint: valuable museum pieces.) Also, working (or at least blinkenlights powered up) exhibits like a CM1 Connection Machine and a Cray X-MP, and a history of their amazing linguistics branch[2] ...

[2] Who have the world's largest collection of bible translations. Want to know why? It's worth your while to pay them a visit.

Download it, block all ports, run pdf reader in a chroot...B)

You can use http://www.zamzar.com/url/ and then convert it to an image file.

Not really. If the NSA would feed me a harmful pdf, it would come so I wouldn't know it is from NSA.

I'll open it on my work computer, they surely already have access to anything important anyway.

If you are that paranoid, then you shouldn't open any pdf that you find on the internet. The NSA has the ability to proxy any file you download and inject anything they want.