gentlemen do not read each other's mail - Hoover's Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson
And the winner is. Get the early lowdown on the Big Brother Awards
I saw this indicated as the real X-Files? FBI site for whats available under the Freedom of Information Act. UFO's, Jimmy Hoffa, Van Halen?
CIA home. There is also a page for the Directorate of Science and Technology and a home page for the kids.
Yes they have Freedom of Information Act information as well. Including a fair amount on UFO's as well. Van Halen came up empty though.
It's probably best not to take the NSA lightly.
Even with that bleak assessment, however, Richard Helms overestimated his true influence. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, "as Director of the CIA, the DCI [Director Central Intelligence ed.] controls less than 10 percent of the combined national and tactical intelligence efforts.
...
So where, then, is the real power base in the U.S. intelligence community? Again, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in terms of both budget and size "the most influential individual is the Director of NSA."
- The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford, Penguin Books, 1983
Also seems visitor friendly enough even including a kids page as well. The Freedom of Information Act page is there including frequently requested information which however denies possesion of any UFO related records. I did stumble on a number of links anyhow.
You probably thought you saw something up in the sky last night other than Venus. But I assure you, it was Venus.
X-Files - Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"
For another idea of the scale of the size of the NSA consider the following
It is almost impossible for anyone to comprehend how much secret information is actually produced each day by the NSA. According to a 1980 report by the Government Accounting Office, the NSA classifies somewhere between fifty and a hundred million documents a year. "That means," the GAO report concluded, "that its classification activity is probably greater than the combined total activity of all components and agencies of the Government." More secrets than the Army, Navy, Air Force, CIA, State Department, and all the other government agencies combined!
Translated into pounds, the Puzzle Palace's production of classified waste is almost forty tons a day, two hundred tons in an average week. Such statistics led one Senator to question an NSA official, "Is the National Security Agency literally burying itself in classified material?" To which the NSA assistant director, seemingly resigned to his fate, responded, "It would seem that way."
- The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford, Penguin Books, 1983
If we also consider...
The NSA is known to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the world; it is also the largest purchaser of computer hardware in the world.
- Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996
We would hope they have the people and technical resources to manage the paper avalanche. Although since we find...
A few years ago says Jeff Jonas, a friend arranged for him to give a talk at the secretive National Security Agency, widely renowned as the most technology-savvy spy shop in the world. He wasn't quite sure what to expect. "I had never even set foot in Washington," says Jonas, founder and chief scientist of Systems Research and Development, A Las Vegas maker of custom software that was being used by casinos and other companies to screen employees and prevent theft. True, Jonas was proud of NORA, his company's Non-Obvious Relationships Awareness analytic software. The system can cross-correlate millions of transactions per day, extracting such items of interest as the info nugget that a particular applicant for a casino job has a sister who shares a telephone number with a known underworld figure. But Jonas reckoned that this would seem like routine stuff to the wizards of the NSA.
Wrong. "I was shocked," Jonas says. After his talk, several members of the audience told him that his technology was more sophisticated than anything the NSA had. And now Systems Research and Development has several government customers. Indeed, he says, "since September 11, the urgency has really peaked.
Including more than this might upset the fine folks at the Technology Review. Subscribe and I guess you can get access to the archives. My subscription has itself elapsed. This article from Mar. 2003 is M. Mitchell Waldrop's, titled - Can sensemaking keep us safe.
Although at least currently a PDF copy of this particular article seems available at www.i2inc.com PDF of article
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty. - Eugene McCarthy, Time magazine, Feb 12, 1979I'm in charge here-Alexander Haig (Following an assasination attempt on president Ronald Reagan)
President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson, I find
this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to
order the use of nuclear weapons.
General "Buck" Turgidson: That's right, sir, you are the only person authorized to do so.
And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like, uh, General
Ripper exceeded his authority.
The September 11 attacks focused attention on the need to ensure the government could continue functioning even if Washington was attacked. On December 28, 2001, President George W. Bush signed executive orders that extensively detailed the lines of succession at key federal agencies [Document 119]. He signed orders for other agencies in mid-2002.
But the Bush administration had secretly taken more dramatic action within hours of the hijackings. Under a contingency plan first developed by the Eisenhower administration when Washington faced a possible nuclear attack during the cold war, the administration sent about 100 top civilian managers in the executive branch to a pair of underground locations on the East Coast. Many were transported by helicopter. It was later revealed that the administration took the unprecedented action because it feared that al Qaeda might explode a suitcase nuclear bomb in Washington that would destroy the city. If that happened and the government was wiped out, the senior administrators-who lived and worked underground in rotations that lasted ninety days-were to restore public services and then create a new government.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer and U.S. News & World Report revealed the existence of the "shadow government" in October 2001. Nonetheless, the issue went unnoticed until the Washington Post published an article about the shadow government on March 1, 2002. Senior administration officials confirmed that the contingency plan had been implemented but refused to provide details. During a presidential trip to Des Moines, Iowa, on the day the Post story appeared, a reporter asked Bush if there really was a shadow government. Bush did not directly answer the question, but said:
[W]e take the continuity-of-government issue very seriously, because our nation was under attack. And I still take the threats that we receive from Al Qaida killers and terrorists very seriously. I have an obligation as the President, and my administration has an obligation to the American people to provide-to put measures in place that, should somebody be successful in attacking Washington, DC, there's an ongoing government. That's one reason why the vice president was going to undisclosed locations. This is serious business, and we take it seriously.
The next day, the New York Times reported that congress and the Supreme Court also had classified contingency plans. The military had already been rotating senior officials to secure locations for years.
Some top congressional leaders complained that they only learned of the shadow government by reading newspaper articles. "None of us knew about the secret government," Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said on Fox News Sunday. "Not knowing things as basic as that is a pretty profound illustration of the chasm that exists sometimes with information." Republican lawamkers said the secrecy was justified by events, and the administration quickly scheduled a round of briefings for senior members of Congress.
Homeland Security - A Documentary History, Bruce Maxwell
[Strangelove's plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]
| Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man.
Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
| |
| Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature. | I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor. |
Dr. Strangelove quotations came from here