Re: Pine Gap


Message posted by lone wolf on November 14, 2005 at 16:46:32 PST:

I know it's in either Bamford's "Body of Secrets" or the "Puzzle Palace."

The key to Pine Gap is it's location makes it hard to intercept the signals beamed to it, that is, it makes it hard to watch the watchers. Ok, more correctly listen in on the listeners since there is value in knowing what the other guy can hear. This was probably important in the dark ages (electronically speaking) when much of the spook stuff was not encrypted. I'd have to reread Bamford's analysis, but I think Pine Gap was handy for "moon bounce" radio signals. In the dark ages, the NSA used a rather large dish antenna on their spy ships to bounce the signal off the moon. Once satellites became more common place, they gave up the technique. [HAMs still do moon bounce communications, but only for geek props.]

The "Blue Cube" is a mystery of sorts. It sits in a very urban area. If you make it really obvious that you are photographing it, security comes a running. [I need to look it up, but Blue Cube security is on an even number, like 412 or 413Mhz.] However, you could be in an office building facing the Blue Cube and photograph it all day long and nothing would happen. There used to be an electronics flea market in the Lockheed parking lot next to the Blue Cube. The flyer for the event said no photography allowed. So you take a crowd of Silicon Valley engineers and put them next to a spy building with dishes everywhere, and did they honestly think nobody would photograph it? Well, needless to say I saw some dude get busted by Blue Cube security. Oh yeah, the flea market had to be moved elsewhere because Lockheed said they wanted their parking lot back for some construction staging. Uh, yeah.

I toured the Blue Cube facility about 10 years ago, seeing maybe 5% of the floor space. Not much of a tour, but you got to go through plenty of bank vault style doors. At least they made it look like you were seeing something the public doesn't see often.

There is a set of dishes in Dublin that were associated with the Blue Cube that the USAF donated to some university.


In Reply to: Re: Pine Gap posted by Trevor on November 14, 2005 at 9:49:18 PST:

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