Friday, November 14, 2008

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY RELEASES MAJOR HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR

Field Station Berlin
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To all of you students of Technical Intelligence and it's contributions to the Security of the Nation, I strongly recommend the following site. It is well done and even with the redactions, highly informative.
Dave Israel

4 comments:

capt john said...

Excellent site !!!

Anonymous said...

Dave: Tell "us" about, "MINARET" ?

UCO President said...

Hi Capt. John
Nov 18, 2008 8:10:00 AM

MINARET is an old program, it was a sub-category of the mother program ECHELON, as I recall there was a releted program SHAMROCK.

ECHELON'S core capability was the Great ECHELON dictionary which defined Watch Lists of "Targets of Interest"

SHAMROCK covered binary traffic EG; Telegraphic text
MINARET covered Speech channels.

All three projects ran into "trouble" when US targets were added to the Dictionary. At first, the US targets were picked up in intercepts of foreign targets which made them quasi-legal.

Then, as an example of classic Mission Creep, US Citizens found their names on the Watch Lists for "Extra Intelligence" reasons.

Then came the destruction of the Intel. Community by such travesties as the Church Committee, the damage done by Frank Church's Committee led to surprises like 9/11 and others.

Much of this stuff is now in the public domain Capt. plug ECHELON into GOOGLE and follow all of the links! See also: USSID 18

Dave

Anonymous said...

Thanks, DAVE - already found a ton of stuff, I am interested in !!!

How about some more "INTEL" articles!