An aircrew member uses the Combat Track II system, the 500th system was delivered to the field last month.
Combat Talon II allows crew aboard the air mobility fleet, as well as on some bombers, to maintain full awareness of friendly and potential hostile aircraft positions.
It also alerts them to ground threats, including mobile surface-to-air missile sites.
(Courtesy photo)
President Barack Obama meets with the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) leadership and analysts during his visit to the NCTC in McLean, Virginia, October 6, 2009. Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton
Why does the National Cryptologic Museum exist? Because it has to: There is a statue celebrating military heroism at Iwo Jima, but no memorial to the brilliant minds that cracked Japanese codes and turned around the Pacific war at Midway Island.
Every school child learns how the beaches of Normandy were stormed, but few knowledgeable adults know about the intelligence professionals who cracked Hitler’s Enigma cipher and saved millions of lives. Without this unique museum the nation and the world might never know what it truly takes to defend freedom.
The National Cryptologic Museum is no Disneyland. It’s the real stories as told by the intelligence professionals who really know. It’s the stories of those who served in silence but saved the world, many times over.
Read more here.
NSA opens the curtain, just a little
Spy agency celebrates its work at its cryptologic museum
By David Wood
November 30, 2008
OUTSIDE FORT MEADE – God bless ‘em, but the nation’s secret code-breakers and eavesdroppers aren’t exactly the most sociable folks you’ll ever meet.
Many of them are hidden away here, behind the National Security Agency’s bunkered fortifications, which are so foreboding they’d make Dick Cheney’s eyes glisten with envy. Others work in uniform on dusty battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, and man austere listening posts across the Middle East and Asia.
They are descendants of an early generation of code-breakers recruited on the eve of World War II, a group of Navy women who were told if they breathed a word to civilians about their work, they’d be shot.
That pretty much sums up the agency’s attitude toward public outreach. “It does not pay to advertise your successes,” says Patrick D. Weadon, a senior NSA official. “There is always a danger when you lift the curtain ever so slightly.”
You could blow an operation. You could be shot.
But even this agency, secretive for good reason, is under pressure to loosen up. And so it is, ever so slightly, lifting the curtain.
The NSA’s public Web site, jazzy but not exactly newsy, grudgingly offers information, including the names of more than 150 American cryptologists who died in action. The modest National Cryptologic Museum just outside the gates offers a look at the agency’s past, which it can talk about.
The NSA needs public support. The agency relies on the public for its $8 billion budget. It needs good relations with Congress to maintain operating authorities. And it must recruit talented linguists, mathematicians, analysts and technicians
Those folks aren’t going to volunteer “if you get people convinced that this is an agency doing things to them rather than for them,” says Bill Nolte, a former NSA and CIA official who is a research professor at the University of Maryland.
“If you don’t have the confidence of the public, you’re going to have a very difficult time,” Weadon says. The work of the NSA “is critical to the survival of the country. What if we hadn’t had this capability prior to the Battle of Midway?” (Answer below)
Read the rest here –> NSA opens the curtain, just a little — baltimoresun.com
UK spying chief emerges from coma
British spying chief Alex Allan, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, has regained consciousness having been in a coma for 10 days.
A Cabinet Office spokesman said there were “positive signs of recovery” in Mr Allan, 57, who has been in intensive care since collapsing at home.
He is expected to remain in hospital for the immediate future while he “regains his strength”.
The spokesman said: “His family are delighted with his progress.”
Mr Allan collapsed at his home on 30 June.
Government sources say there is no sign of foul play.
Mr Allan’s committee collates information from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and briefs the prime minister, ministers and officials on intelligence assessments on issues such as security, defence and foreign affairs.
The deputy chairman takes over in the absence of the chairman but Cabinet Office policy is not to publicly name the person.
Read more here.
Bletchley Park faces bleak future
Historians have postulated that, without Bletchley Park, the Allies may never have won the war.
But, despite an impressive contribution to the war effort, the Bletchley Park site, now a museum, faces a bleak future unless it can secure funding to keep its doors open and its numerous exhibits from rotting away.
Read more here.
For Your Eyes Only
Washington Post
– Amy Orndorff
Love the International Spy Museum but cringe at the idea of shelling out $18 to indulge your inner 007? Convert those bills into gas, buy a couple of gallons and head north to the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade.
Artifacts at the museum include a German Enigma cipher machine, left, used during World War II for encoding messages. (Visitors can even try it out.)
James Bond doesn’t have anything on National Security Agency code breakers. He might have won over the ladies, but these sleuths started wars, prevented attacks and busted criminals.
“Intelligence is not just getting good information. It’s knowing when to use it,” tour guide and retired NSA employee Howell McConnell tells a group on a recent Saturday in front of an exhibit about the World War I Zimmermann telegram.
The coded German telegram was intercepted and deciphered by the British as it traveled from the foreign minister in Berlin, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador in Mexico. It encouraged Mexico to start a war with the United States so the Americans would be too busy to join the war in Europe. Mexico would have gained land, and the Germans would have had free rein to sink ships in the Atlantic. The telegram was the push Congress needed to authorize America’s entry into the war.
The gritty authenticity of the National Cryptologic Museum beats just about anything the Spy Museum has to offer, from the docents like McConnell to the exhibits assembled by real-life code-breakers to the barbed-wire fence and guard huts that separate the museum from the NSA buildings nearby.
The museum gives an unclassified glimpse of the history of American espionage, but there’s little to be spooked about. The atmosphere is welcoming, and there is plenty for little hands to play with and older eyes to take in.
Read the rest here.
America’s top spy fears cyber-terror against U.S.
Greenville native says, ‘We’re not safe, but we’re safer’
By Ben Szobody
STAFF WRITER
Mike McConnell, President Bush’s director of national intelligence, told The Greenville News on Friday that the country’s cyber networks pose a national vulnerability “probably unprecedented in our history,” and he hopes to create a robust federal program to prevent an attack that he said would have “an order of magnitude global impact greater than 9-11.”
He also pushed for three key provisions in a controversial surveillance bill pending in Congress, saying passage is crucial because a “significant — some would even say majority” — portion of what the U.S. knows about terrorists and their plans comes from listening to their communication.
In an hour-long speech at Furman University, the country’s top spy traced his career from modest childhood roots in Greenville through his first semester sleeping in a gym closet at Furman, and later to jobs as intelligence director during the Gulf War and director of the National Security Agency.
Asked to assess U.S. intelligence since 2001, McConnell, whose Cabinet position was created in part to increase sharing between intelligence agencies, said, “We’re not safe, but we’re safer.”
He urged Furman students to consider a life of public service and said he’d like to build a house on a lot he owns in The Cliffs at Glassy.
Read the rest here.
Just what is meant by the term Failure of Intelligence?
The term is being heard more frequently these days. Not as often as the term Surge, but often enough to serve the cause of punditry in these dark days.
Osama bin Laden is back in the news again, with another of his messages.
But what do they mean?
Is this a failure of intelligence?
Reuters has published a list of bin Laden messages here, so you can look for yourselves.
Maybe you can figure it out.
Or maybe there just aren’t enough of those messages. Can we get him to generate more of them?
That could be the solution: get more messages to study. Any ideas on how to do that?
More is certainly better than fewer.
CIA: Cyber Attacks Turn Out the Lights
By Michael Tanji
h/t: ThreatsWatch
The importance of securing national resources that access cyberspace just got a shot in the arm.
On Wednesday, in New Orleans, US Central Intelligence Agency senior analyst Tom Donohue told a gathering of 300 US [and foreign] government officials, engineers and security managers from [critical infrastructure sectors] asset owners that
“We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands. We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge. We have information that cyber attacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the United States. In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet.”
Such an event would be problematic at any time, but timed to occur during high-stress periods like during heat waves or inclement weather, the impact could be devastating.
Most “cyber terrorism” noted to date is little more than miscreant mischief, but a concerted effort to conduct a serious attack in this sector could actually cost lives.
The volume may be minor, but the idea that services we take for granted are not under our control is one way to shake people’s confidence in the government’s ability to protect them.
Never yell at the dentist, especially while he is working in your mouth.
Try not to distract him from his task.
One of the nice things about hearing aids is that you can turn them off, when you’re doing something that requires careful attention and good focus.
Would a dentist wearing hearing aids do better work than one who didn’t?
How about people who work in intelligence agencies?
Does getting yelled at affect their ability to do a good job?
Can an incoming cloud of rotten tomatoes affect the output of intelligence workers?
Whatever their motives for getting into intelligence work, what makes them stay?
If you know anybody in that line of work, ask them why.
Might not mention any recent Hollywood movies on the subject.
Resources
Diplomatic, intelligence agencies win praise for recruiting
More? Start here.
Official: People should change their definition of privacy
If you grew up in a small town, you may be wondering what all the fuss over privacy is really about.
If you’re old enough to remember party line telephones, you might even wonder what the word means.
In those days, the term often referred to the privileged class, and others who were financially equipped to appear to be privileged.
Since then, the idea of privacy has blossomed into a full blown “God given” right. Some attribute that growth to the baby boomers, and some others to the anti-war fever of the 70′s.
And now, some years after 9/11, we’re still redefining it.
That’s the most important idea here: the definition of “Privacy” is changing, even as we talk about it.
And if the definition of “privacy” is indeed a work in progress, then we have to accept the notion that it may continue to change, especially as our enemies change.
As someone once put it, it is important not to blow a hole in the dike while arguing over whose finger should plug the leak.
Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, recently weighed in on this subject.
WASHINGTON (AP) – As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.
Privacy no longer could mean anonymity, said Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s information.
Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation reasonably was believed to be outside the U.S.
Read the rest -> here.
On a dark and rainy night, I can watch you walking down the street and I can tell where the puddles are.
I don’t have to see them.
Sometimes I can tell which pair of shoes you are wearing. — Anon
