Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Spoofing and Secrecy
other communications of both friends and adversaries of the
United States. Surreptitiously, it reads the world's mail. Its daily
intercept traffic is huge. In times of tension, vast arrays of NSA
personnel fluent in the relevant languages are sitting with earphones,
monitoring in real time everything from encrypted commands
from the target nation's General Staff to pillow talk. For
other material there are key words by which computers cull out
for human attention specific messages or conversations of current
urgent concern. Everything is stored, so that retrospectively it is
possible to go back to the magnetic tapes and to trace the first
appearance of a codeword, say, or command responsibility in a
crisis. Some of the intercepts are made from listening posts in
nearby countries (Turkey for Russia, India for China), from
aircraft and ships patrolling nearby, or from ferret satellites in
Earth orbit. There is a continuing dance of measures and countermeasures
between the NSA and the security services of other
nations, who understandably do not wish to be listened in on.
Now add to this already heady mix the Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA). A request is made to the NSA for all information it
has available on UFOs. It is required by law to be responsive, but
of course without revealing 'methods and sources'. NSA also feels
a deep obligation not to alert other nations, friends or foes, in an
obtrusive and politically embarrassing way, to its activities. So a
more or less typical intercept released by NSA in response to an
FOIA request will be a third of a page blacked out, a fragment of
a line saying 'reported a UFO at low altitude', followed by
two-thirds of a page blacked out. The NSA's position is that
releasing the rest of the page would potentially compromise
sources and methods, or at least alert the nation in question to
how readily its aviation radio traffic is being intercepted. (If NSA
released surrounding, seemingly bland, aircraft-to-tower transmissions,
it would then be possible for the nation in question to
recognize that its military air traffic control dialogues are being
monitored and to switch to communications means - frequency
hopping, for example - that make NSA intercepts more difficult.)
But UFO conspiracy theorists receiving, in response to their
FOIA requests, dozens of pages of material, almost all of it
blacked out, understandably deduce that the NSA possesses
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