Monday, May 23, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Layers upon layers
From the NY Times book review section:
...Ms. Jacobsen will eventually address the U.F.O. issue with which conspiracy theorists eagerly associate Area 51, but her book is not science fiction. It’s much more levelheaded. It is an assertive account, revelatory but also mystifying, of the long-hidden United States weaponry and espionage programs to which she says Area 51 is home.
...Ms. Jacobsen will eventually address the U.F.O. issue with which conspiracy theorists eagerly associate Area 51, but her book is not science fiction. It’s much more levelheaded. It is an assertive account, revelatory but also mystifying, of the long-hidden United States weaponry and espionage programs to which she says Area 51 is home.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Self Publishing: Tinkerer's Delight, Perfectionist's Downfall.
I am learning on the fly about how to format e-books. Which means getting deeper into the use of document styles than I ever wanted to be. But it is incredibly easy to download and upload files....which is maybe not such a good thing because I could tinker with something forever and sometimes fixing one problem causes another...
The next self-publishing hurdle is that of reformatting The Good-bye Man text and adding pictures and document scans,and produce paperback books via Amazon's CreateSpace program. Available soon. We hope.
The next self-publishing hurdle is that of reformatting The Good-bye Man text and adding pictures and document scans,and produce paperback books via Amazon's CreateSpace program. Available soon. We hope.
The Story in the Footnotes or Why I Blog.
The Brown saga touches upon so very many topics tangentially, that blogging about them is my way of jotting notes to myself that I can never misplace. Today, I just want to quote from this Quonset Hut post, in which Linda responds to Mikado's question about a seeming time contradiction in her perceptions of events.
There is only one answer to that.http://www.ttownsendbrown.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=841&start=30
Its an answer that is so preposterous right now everyone but a very few would laugh off of their chair if I mentioned it. It is also the truth of things... whether some want to accept it or not.
The man I met when I was nine is a man I know now.... he brought the " set" back to my Dad then after taking it away in the fifties.... for safekeeping.... The man who rescued my Father in the thirties... is a man I know now.....
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
I spy, with my little eye...
And, speaking of Signals Intelligence, from the American Chronicle, which attributes it to Psyche Leaks at Starpod, although I'll be danged if I can find it on the page they link:
NSA-related sources first revealed the existence of the NSA paranormal program to investigative author Gus Russo, in 2007.
According to Russo's sources, the NSA considers the use of 'psychic information' as a legitimate form of signals intelligence, suggesting a transmission medium may have been confirmed by NSA scientists. During the cold war, several Soviet scientists claimed so-called torsion fields stored and transmitted human perceptions, allowing for "remote viewing" of distant locations. In the 1970s the CIA sponsored research into remote viewing and later the American Defense Intelligence Agency tasked a small group of psychic intelligence officers against targets in the Soviet Union. Some of the DIA STAR GATE psychic spy files were released through the CIA in 2004.
Townsend, Project AZORIAN, Project DUMAND, and Project JENNIFER
To continue with the Project Azorian discussion I started yesterday, the reason we knew exactly where the Soviet Submarine sank was because we had the Pacific Ocean wired by then. Signal scooping had come a very long way since the base at Barking Sands was reactivated in 1947-48 and converted to a big U.S. ear on the Pacific rim.
My second foundational belief about what Townsend did after WWII (with the work on Kaui being the root from which all else sprang) is based on something Mr. Twigsnapper has said: Townsend had a vital interest in communications security. I believe he was instrumental in the establishment of the Navy's COMSEC group and for tucking them away on an air force base in San Antonio,Texas, where no one would think to look. And conveniently removed from Admirals.
Poor Townsend suffered greatly in his life because of abysmally bad security. He lost his finger because of it, he saw his work at Pearl Harbor sold out to a Soviet mole because of it, and knowledge of his work at Martin Decker ended in Soviet hands because of it, when imprisoned British spy, George Blake, managed to escape..
So, Townsend would have played a large part in creating a sophisticated and secure communications network and in the expansion of it afterward. He would also have played a large part in the creation of the communication signals network used by the Azorian project. Aaaand, from my reading of the DUMAND papers, its first sensors were supported by the physical infrastructure of the network. Or at least they were, until, as Townsend would later tell Linda, the fish ate them.
But to my knowledge the true code name for the entire Azorian project was not released before 2010. Until then, those who were aware of the secret mission knew only that Townsend was involved in it and that it was named "Project JENNIFER; as his private salute to the birth of his granddaughter. But the NSA article indicates that JENNIFER was a separate but overlapping project, and one which seems to be more inline with Townsend's interests.
My second foundational belief about what Townsend did after WWII (with the work on Kaui being the root from which all else sprang) is based on something Mr. Twigsnapper has said: Townsend had a vital interest in communications security. I believe he was instrumental in the establishment of the Navy's COMSEC group and for tucking them away on an air force base in San Antonio,Texas, where no one would think to look. And conveniently removed from Admirals.
Poor Townsend suffered greatly in his life because of abysmally bad security. He lost his finger because of it, he saw his work at Pearl Harbor sold out to a Soviet mole because of it, and knowledge of his work at Martin Decker ended in Soviet hands because of it, when imprisoned British spy, George Blake, managed to escape..
So, Townsend would have played a large part in creating a sophisticated and secure communications network and in the expansion of it afterward. He would also have played a large part in the creation of the communication signals network used by the Azorian project. Aaaand, from my reading of the DUMAND papers, its first sensors were supported by the physical infrastructure of the network. Or at least they were, until, as Townsend would later tell Linda, the fish ate them.
But to my knowledge the true code name for the entire Azorian project was not released before 2010. Until then, those who were aware of the secret mission knew only that Townsend was involved in it and that it was named "Project JENNIFER; as his private salute to the birth of his granddaughter. But the NSA article indicates that JENNIFER was a separate but overlapping project, and one which seems to be more inline with Townsend's interests.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarc...kevault/ebb305/doc01.pdfSecurity policy and procedures were in accordance with the basic _____ agreement, which placed security management responsibility for the new security system, code-named JENNIFER, with the Dirctor of Security, CIA, acting for the DCI. The Director of Security in turn, delegated everyday security responsiblity to the Chief of the _________ at CIA and directed him to establish compartmentation procedures to insulate JENNIFER data from data relating to other programs.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Project Azorian and the CIA; then and now
The CIA's Project Azorian has come up for discussion on the never-ending notebooks thread that continues at the History Channel's UFO board.,
For the uninitiated, the cover story for the Azorian was that Howard Hughes was developing a deep sea mining vehicle called the Glomar Explorer, to retrieve manganese nodules from the ocean floor. The project was actually initiated to retrieve a sunken soviet sub carrying nuclear missiles. Those who want to know more about the when's and why's of this project are invited to read the article, Project Azorian The CIA's Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer first published in1987 in the NSA's inhouse intelligence journal.
The article was declassified by them in 2010, apparently in response to the then-forthcoming book: Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129, which paints the CIA in a favorable light.
Thought I have yet to read the book, I have read the redacted CIA files on the subject and there are many fascinating aspects to the story. One of the most intriguing lies in the connection of Project Azorian to the Sept 11, 1973 overthrow of the Democratically elected Marxist President of Chile, Savadore Allende. The Explorer and her USN warship escort just happened to be in the Valparaiso harbor on that particular day, passing through on their way up the Pacific coast to the Catalina trials. This "happenstance" would certainly seem to reinforce the common belief that what was presented then as a military coup was actually initiated and supported by the CIA. They were noted for such things in those years.
But most people simply remember the Explorer as the first "commercial" vehicle of her kind. Now, some 23 years after the article, 35 years after the project, the NSA archivist dismisses the CIA's underwater engineering contributions, giving credit to the US Navy for much more "cutting edge" deep sea achievements. Actually, it is an unfortunate reality of engineering that before cutting edge work can be conducted in extreme environments, a lot of basic component engineering must be done first. It's not glamorous work, but it's necessary.
However, putting that argument aside, if that archivist's comment was not picked up by some congressional underling and presented as an "informed opinion" in the 2011 black budget slicing and dicing battles --which of course might have been the reason the statement was made to begin with-- then some elected offical's assistant was asleep on the job.
For the uninitiated, the cover story for the Azorian was that Howard Hughes was developing a deep sea mining vehicle called the Glomar Explorer, to retrieve manganese nodules from the ocean floor. The project was actually initiated to retrieve a sunken soviet sub carrying nuclear missiles. Those who want to know more about the when's and why's of this project are invited to read the article, Project Azorian The CIA's Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer first published in1987 in the NSA's inhouse intelligence journal.
The article was declassified by them in 2010, apparently in response to the then-forthcoming book: Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129, which paints the CIA in a favorable light.
Thought I have yet to read the book, I have read the redacted CIA files on the subject and there are many fascinating aspects to the story. One of the most intriguing lies in the connection of Project Azorian to the Sept 11, 1973 overthrow of the Democratically elected Marxist President of Chile, Savadore Allende. The Explorer and her USN warship escort just happened to be in the Valparaiso harbor on that particular day, passing through on their way up the Pacific coast to the Catalina trials. This "happenstance" would certainly seem to reinforce the common belief that what was presented then as a military coup was actually initiated and supported by the CIA. They were noted for such things in those years.
But most people simply remember the Explorer as the first "commercial" vehicle of her kind. Now, some 23 years after the article, 35 years after the project, the NSA archivist dismisses the CIA's underwater engineering contributions, giving credit to the US Navy for much more "cutting edge" deep sea achievements. Actually, it is an unfortunate reality of engineering that before cutting edge work can be conducted in extreme environments, a lot of basic component engineering must be done first. It's not glamorous work, but it's necessary.
However, putting that argument aside, if that archivist's comment was not picked up by some congressional underling and presented as an "informed opinion" in the 2011 black budget slicing and dicing battles --which of course might have been the reason the statement was made to begin with-- then some elected offical's assistant was asleep on the job.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Step right up, folks! Git yer tickets here! Manned trip to Mars!!
NEW YORK (AFP) – Private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years, the head of the firm said.
"We'll probably put a first man in space in about three years," Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. "We're going all the way to Mars, I think... best case 10 years, worst case 15 to 20 years."
Circles in Thin Ice
Recent high altitude imagery of the deepest lake in the world, courtesy of NASA
Linda reminds me that the work which lead to the building of giant neutrino particle detectors was originally done as part of Project DUMAND.The Soviet group worked at the edge of Lake Baikal and the US project continues at the South Pole as Project Amanda. Perhaps the Soviet group completed their 'scope in 2009 when these circles were first observed.
What's particularly interesting to me is that the two of us (Linda and I that is) were just talking about the "glitches" her father observed with his constantly running sensor network. These glitches always come in pairs: after the initial one arrives, there is another, much stronger one in an exact span of time.
As I reread the DUMAND documents, I see that they say, "... The second (decay) burst would be typically twice as bright as the first ($\sim 10^{11}$ photons), and both would be detectable at distances of hundreds of meters in the ocean." Now I wonder if Townsend's rock sensors were reacting to neutrino bursts?
Monday, May 2, 2011
More on I-4, (as we, the acronym savvy, have deemed it)
For those who want to know more about current state of affairs concerning the Internicine Interrelationships in the Intelligence Industry
And still more.
McRaven: JSOC and beyond
And still more.
McRaven: JSOC and beyond
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