About STELLARWIND and other mysterious classification markings

[coderman]

http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2014/09/about-stellarwind-and-another.html

[ ... a good read; go do so now! ]

for the TL;DR crowd:
"""
In the end, it doesn't make much difference whether STELLARWIND is a
control system on its own, or a sub-system of COMINT, but it is
remarkable that for such an important program, the people involved
apparently also weren't clear about it's exact status and how to put
it in the right place of a classification line.

More important though is that the declassified documents show that
besides the STELLARWIND program, there's at least one
COMINT-compartment with at least one sub-compartment that protect
similar or related NSA collection efforts which are considered even
more sensitive, but about which we can only speculate.
"""