From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates.nul>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:50:29 -0400
Fwd Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:50:29 -0400
Subject: Peek At NSA's Secret Reading List




Source: Wired.Com - New York, New York, USA

http://tinyurl.co.uk/7sku

Sep, 27, 2006

[Many useful links at site]


Peek At NSA's Secret Reading List

By Ryan Singel

The tantalizing tables of contents to the best spy magazines
you'll probably never get to read have been posted online,
thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request that pried open
four classified National Security Agency publications.

Written specifically for NSA employees, the articles listed in
the online indexes date back as far as 1956. Stories include an
analysis of the TRS-80 Model 1's password-encryption algorithm,
accounts of how Soviet codes were broken, analyses of bad
management techniques within the sprawling eavesdropping agency,
and an insider's view of North Korea's capture of the spy boat
U.S.S. Pueblo in 1968.

The Memory Hole, a website dedicated to ferreting out and
publishing government documents, posted the indexes from
Cryptologic Quarterly, Cryptologic Almanac, Cryptologic Spectrum
and NSA Technical Journal on Monday. The lists were obtained
following a smartly targeted FOIA request filed by researcher
Michael Ravnitzky in 2003.

"This is one of the first glimpses we have had into NSA's own
library -- and it’s a safe bet there are some gems in there,"
said Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood.

Titles include "NSA in the Cyberpunk Future: A Somewhat Educated
Guess at Things to Come" (1996), "I Was a Cryptologic Corporal"
(1983), "Inference and Cover Stories" (1993), "Handy-Dandy Field
Site History: Fifty Years of Field Operations, 1945-1995," "The
Fallacy of the One-Time-Pad Excuse" (1969), "Meteor Burst
Communications: An Ignored Phenomenon?" (1990) and "KAL 007
Shootdown: A View From (redacted)".

Secret spy programs such as Milkbush, Interrograph, Bourbon,
Team Spirit, Ratbag, Tidytips III and Purple Dragon show up on
the tables of contents. The listings also reveal the NSA's
traffic analyst of the year award, called Gold Nugget.

While a few of these articles have been released before --
 including one called "Communication With Extraterrestrial
Intelligence" (.pdf) by NSA Technical Journal founder Lambros D.
Callimahos -- the newly released indexes offer a "wealth of
leads," according to Aftergood.

"The titles are tantalizing," he said. "You see them and you
want to know more, but whether the reports themselves are
equally intriguing or deadly dull or merely historical
curiosities is impossible to say."

The indexes also give researchers details they can use to target
specific documents rather than making blanket requests for all
papers about a certain subject. The extra info could help
streamline the processing of FOIA requests, according to Jeffrey
Richelson, senior fellow at The National Security Archive.

While Richelson has gotten his hands on Cryptologic Spectrum
articles in the past and said he would probably request a few
more based on the now-public indexes, he said he doubts the
documents will contain any big secrets.

"There are likely no great news stories in here, especially when
you take into account what you are getting compared to what is
in the articles before redactions (by NSA FOIA officials)," he
said.


[Thanks to Stuart Miller of http://www.uforeview.net for the lead]