NSA Expands, Centralizes Domestic Spying
Code Name(s) of the Week: DIAZ, Emergejust,
Freedom, Highpoint, PASSGEAR, Viceroy
By William M. Arkin
01/31/06 "Washington
Post" -- -- 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.
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