New Snowden leaks unravel mystery behind NSA's UK base

https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/06/menwith-hill-station-leak/

by cheleby • 10 years ago

43 26 10 years ago

dogma11383• 10 years ago

FORNSAT could potentially be iffy, but OVERHEAD and GHOSTHUNTER is exactly the kind of programmes that the NSA and any other national SIGINT agency is supposed to run. Geographically confined and directed at specific adversaries to achieve clear military goals.

trendia2• 10 years ago

When you say those are the programs that they're "supposed to run", I ask, who gave them that mandate?

Specifically ... Who gets to determine which programs the NSA is allowed to run? And who gets to determine what civilian data they are permitted to retain? And who gets to determine the "acceptable" number of civilian casualties when they bomb in Yemen?

jessaustin• 10 years ago

Respectively, uhhh... NSA, NSA, and a combination of CIA and Pentagon.

Did you expect checks and balances?

jomamaxx2• 10 years ago

"When you say those are the programs that they're "supposed to run", I ask, who gave them that mandate?"

Congress, elected by the people.

Most Americans are supportive of the USA's actions as it relates to spying on Putin etc.

As far as snooping on Americans, it depends on the type.

If Snowden is a 'whistleblower' - he should be talking about things that are clearly out of bounds. When he talks about normal espionage activity - he's committing a pretty serious crime.

The 'whistle blower' who blew the lid in the Abu Garib prison scandal was well protected by the US.

SubiculumCode• 10 years ago

Exactly, and I'd be silly not to expect other countries to do the same to the U.S.

helthanatos• 10 years ago

Governments are not supposed to do as much as they want to do. Governments should be smaller and protect their country. The reputation the US has as the "police of the world" is a negative one because getting into other nation's affairs is ridiculous. If it isn't an imminent threat, it shouldn't be worried about as much. The reason the US should stay in areas such as the middle east right now is because they are the ones that caused the issue. Governments need to get out of each other's hair and worry strictly about their own actions.

ethanbond• 10 years ago

Governments are just supposed to act as if there aren't other countries in the world? Something tells me this principle wouldn't result in the peaceful, logical decisions you're hoping for.

lkmlkmsfd2• 10 years ago

You're starting with the assumption that NSA is a good idea in the first place. It's not.

throwanem2• 10 years ago

'Gentlemen do not read each other's mail'?

dogma11383• 10 years ago

Only siths deal in absolutes.

Good and bad are silly and childish terms, a modern military needs the capability to intercept enemy signals, a nation state needs signal intelligence capabilities to facilitate it's own national interests and security.

This doesn't mean that the NSA should capture every email, facebook post and tweet and store it for future use.

But that doesn't mean that a signal intelligence agency running a SIGINT/ELINT missions in direct support of a military activity is inherently bad it isn't anything, it just is, as this is a capability that any modern military complex has to posses.

anexprogrammer2• 10 years ago

EDIT: The source article is a much better, longer, read and does actually indicate new information - suggest the link is updated:

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/06/nsa-menwith-hill-targete...

Not sure how much mystery there was - Duncan Campbell revealed most of this (the Engadget summary anyway) in the 80s.

tjpd• 10 years ago

One of the interesting things from the slide shown in the article is that they're extracting the azimuth and elevation of roof based satellite dishes from aerial imagery presumably to cross correlate with the satellite orbits and whatever comms they're eavesdropping on.

sbierwagen• 10 years ago

Which is, of course, the reason the dishes at Menwith are in radomes in the first place. (So other intelligence agencies can't tell which satellites the NSA is snooping on) Kinda funny the article didn't bring it up.

dboreham2• 10 years ago

20-odd years ago I lived a few miles from Menwith and drove past it on the way to work. A few years before that I had worked on hardware for massively parallel systems, much of which ended up in black projects. As I drove by, I would muse as to how much of my gear was whirring away in that place..

fwiw everyone in the local tech industry knew the real mission for the base in 1993 so I'm also not sure how much of the article is "new news".

In those days I would frequent a village pub close to the base that run a quiz one night every week. The pub had a public bar and a smaller back dining room / saloon bar. I quickly learned that only certain people were allowed to frequent the back room on quiz night (I never saw them); that they were very very good at quizzes; and by custom the pub banned any questions specific to the USA in the quiz.

anexprogrammer2• 10 years ago

A pub that was probably really easy to spot as a haunt of Menwith Hill by having a car park full of US cars.

Used to surprise me driving past at how many big US cars you'd see driving on and off base. I'd wonder how it was worth shipping them across the pond instead of using something local for duration of their posting.

somenomadicguy• 10 years ago

There was a time when this would have been leaked on Wikileaks and sensationalized for weeks. Snowden seems to be able to maintain his composure, grace, and professionalism while in exile in Russia, he's still an inspiration.

Assange on the other hand, not so much.

(Edited for typos)

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd• 10 years ago

Snowden handed over those documents to journalists back when he was in Hong Kong. Ever since he has no direct control over what gets published (or when).

New Snowden leaks unravel mystery behind NSA's UK base

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