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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Peek at NSA's Secret Reading List Peek at NSA's Secret Reading List [Print story] [E-mail story] [Rants + Raves] Page 1 of 1 Breaking News & By Ryan Singel| Also by this reporter 02:00 AM Sep, 27, 2006 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.
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#1. To: tom007 (#0)
What, no overview of the function keys on the Atari 1200XL?! Amateurs....
No Nancy Drew either.
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