NSA Expands, Centralizes Domestic Spying

[Eugen Leitl]

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/01/nsa_expands_its.html

William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
NSA Expands, Centralizes Domestic Spying

Code Name(s) of the Week: DIAZ, Emergejust, Freedom, Highpoint, PASSGEAR,
Viceroy

The National Security Agency is in the process of building a new warning hub
and data warehouse in the Denver area, realigning much of its workforce from
Ft. Meade, Maryland to Colorado.

The Denver Post reported last week that NSA was moving some of its operations
to the Denver suburb of Aurora.

On the surface, the NSA move seems to be a management and cost cutting
measure, part of a post-9/11 decentralization. "This strategy better aligns
support to national decision makers and combatant commanders," an NSA
spokesman told the Denver paper.

In truth, NSA is aligning its growing domestic eavesdropping operations --
what the administration calls "terrorist warning" in its current PR campaign
-- with military homeland defense organizations, as well as the CIA's new
domestic operations Colorado.

Translation: Hey Congress, Colorado is now the American epicenter for national
domestic spying.

In May, Dana Priest reported here in The Washington Post that the CIA was
planning to shift much of its domestic operations to Aurora, Colorado.

The move of the CIA's National Resources Division was then described as being
undertaken "for operational reasons."

The Division is responsible for exploiting the knowledge of U.S. citizens and
foreigners in the United States who might have unique information about
foreign countries and terrorist activities. The functions extend from engaging
Iraqi or Iranian Americans in covert operations to develop information and
networks in their home countries to recruiting foreign students and visitors
to be American spies.

Aurora is already a reconnaissance satellite downlink and analytic center
focusing on domestic warning. The NSA and CIA join U.S. Northern Command
(NORTHCOM) in Colorado. NORTHCOM is post 9/11 the U.S. military command
responsible for homeland defense.

The new NSA operation is located at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, at a
facility commonly known as the Aerospace Data Facility.

According to Government Executive Magazine -- thanks DP -- "NSA is building a
massive data storage facility in Colorado, which will be able to hold the
electronic equivalent of the Library of Congress every two days." This new NSA
data warehouse is the hub of "data mining" and analysis development, allowing
the eavesdropping agency to develop and make better use of the unbelievabytes
of data it collects but does not exploit.

Part of the move to Denver, Government Executive reported, was to expand NSA's
base of contractors able to support its increasingly complex intelligence
extraction mission.

Contracting documents from 2004 and 2005 obtained by this reporter identify
numerous Top Secret and compartmented computing and signals intelligence
projects being run by prime contractors Lockheed Martin; Northrop Grumman
Mission Systems; and Raytheon on behalf of NSA in Colorado to building the
domestic warning hub and data warehouse. The projects have the code names
DIAZ, Emergejust, Freedom, Highpoint, PASSGEAR, and Viceroy.

Ironically, the only federal agency seemingly absent from the domestic
intelligence trifecta is the Department of Homeland Security, perpetually out
to lunch.

Note: A free copy of my book Code Names to any reader who can tell me -- in
English -- what any of these programs actually do.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
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