Cache of documents declassified by the NRO for its 60th anniversary | Hacker News Reader

Cache of documents declassified by the NRO for its 60th anniversary

nro.gov

103 pointsstarwind49 comments

Randomly skimming the documents, this is my favorite line so far from a document discussing funding and competition for a new recon satellite system [1]

"Mr. Duckett commented that the Governmant had been carful not to pry too deeply into this area because there were a number of "gentleman's agreements" between contractors"

Sounds very pragmatic of them.

[1] https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/declass/MAJOR%...

Also worth noting that the Deputy SecDef present, David Packard, was the Dave Packard.

For others wondering - he's the Packard from Hewlett-Packard which people know better as HP.

What struck me reading through those memos is that Packard wasn't just going through the motions or (overtly) looking to finagle HP procurement deals, but that he was actually approaching the job like a professional manager, conducting dialogue between the executive and legislative branches in an effective and informed way.

1970s: Captains of industry take time away from their companies to act as public servants and provide useful advice and experience at top levels of government

2020s: Captains of industry flame US Senators to a crisp on Twitter

Letter explaining some of the information available here: https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/news/press/2021/202...

"The SIGINT satellite story" looks interesting: https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/declass/HISTOR...

The NRO have the best mission patches.

NROL-39 seems to be the crowd-pleaser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_launches

What you really want is NROL-11 which inadvertently revealed the classified location of the payload: https://gizmodo.com/decoding-hidden-messages-in-those-geeky-...

NRO have most of the best ones but this patch has to be my favourite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/509th_Operations_Group#/media/...

For anyone interested Trevor Paglen wrote a book about these patches. His talk at CCC is one of my all time favourites. Towards the end he provides the background to some of these patches:

https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5604_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312282...

My favorite might be the one with Elvish on it. They're all so varied. Obscure literature references would be a good way of making sure foreign intelligence officers are well-read! :D

My main conclusion from reviewing this list is that there are a lot of furries working at NRO.

How so? The names look mostly astronomical to me.

The ones in Latin and Irish are some real low-quality translations, but the patches are badass. I love the world-consuming octopus.

You can find a bunch of eBay if you search for 'NRO launch patch'.

NROL 39 is absolutely iconic.

A few years ago during at stay at a villa/condo resort in Maui, grilling dinner, I discovered that my "grill mate" cooking his family's dinner on the adjacent grill, worked for NRO. That was an interesting conversation...

Actually...he didn't "work" for NRO -- he told me that pretty much nobody works for NRO per se, but he worked "in" NRO, employed by some other TLA.

People who work for intelligence agencies generally do not randomly tell complete strangers on their vacation that they work for intelligence agencies.

I don't know what you do for work, but he might have been trying to manipulate you. It's a common trick to disclose a 'secret' to someone to get them to trust you.

Imagine reading HN to only find out you were manipulated on vacation by someone

And on that anniversary the Russians did a anti-satellite missile test:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/16/russia-defen...

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/15/politics/russia-anti-sate...

60th Anniversary? So many anniversaries.

Anniversary of its founding (1960) [1]. Anniversary of the first public mention (1971). Anniversary of first official acknowledgment (1973). Anniversary of its existence being declassified (1992).

NRO -- abbreviation for "We'd tell you, but then we'd have to kill you."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...

It seems so weird that they're still redacting things from the late 1960s. All of the technology they're talking about in those memos has been far surpassed by even commercial enterprises, so who even cares anymore?

I don't think we know that all tech has been eclipsed commercially. Recall that in 2012 NRO donated two unused, spare satellites to NASA that were superior to the Hubble telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O... and when President Trump tweeted out a, presumably NRO-sourced, picture it was at ~10cm resolution or better https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/01/t... .

More to the point, there are sensors that are not commercially interesting but could be interesting for NRO's mission.

You may be interested in the National Image Interpretability Rating Scales (NIIRS)[1]. Spatial resolution alone is not enough to achieve a high score if the image is blurry, noisy or obscured by clouds or sun reflection, or if it is too oblique or not oblique enough.

WorldView-3 (best commercial satellite imagery currently available) can apparently achieve NIIRS 5.7 in ideal conditions[2] although I'd wager that is a fairly optimistic figure. According to what is known or predicted[3] about the image you referred to, I'd guess it is maybe NIIRS 6.5-7.5 according to the scale listed at [1]. NIIRS 5 vs 6 vs 7 are very significant increases in quality on this scale.

NIIRS 6 according to [1] would allow someone to determine from an image whether they're looking at [4] versus [5], NIIRS 7 would show a vent on the roof of van or ladder on the side (not possible in WorldView-3 imagery e.g. [6]), NIIRS 8 would mean it's possible to see windscreen wipers on individual vehicles (something that appears to be stretch beyond what the image you refer to shows).

[1] https://irp.fas.org/imint/niirs.htm

[2] https://www.gim-international.com/content/news/higher-resolu...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20845111

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_Russian_Helix_KA-27_(cr...

[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kamov_Ka-29_%E2%80%9...

[6] https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2020/introducing-1...

A lot of classified stuff that is not known to the public is an open secret among the Baddies (TM).

Bin Laden apparently always wore a large hat (a cowboy hat, I believe? Pretty crazy) because he knew the CIA / NRO had satellites good enough to identify him.

It feels like "classified" is often an excuse to shut down conversation and general public awareness about how much something costs, not to actually protect knowledge of our capabilities.

So, Bin Laden: the one guy with a cowboy hat in Asia. Probably easier to recognize from space than his face.

One of the donated telescopes is being used as the basis for the Roman (neé WFIRST) telescope, launching some time around 2027. It'll also be interesting to see if using the donated hardware ends up actually saving any money.

> saving any money.

NASA does not understand these words in this order you have put them. By "saving" you mean tripling them, twice?

Yeah, it seems like there were 2 schools of thought.

One saying "let's just build cheap and compact optics that meet our minimum requirements"

Another saying "we have this badass hardware available, let's use it even though it goes well beyond our original design in terms of capabilities and also size/weight/complexity"

It’s not like they haven’t done this before. Take a look at the KH-11 and tell me that doesn’t look exactly like the Hubble, just pointed the other way.

In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the Hubble was actually a cover for some KH-type mission, and the reason they had to go fix the optics to make it actually useful for space telescope purposes was because they had “accidentally” left the earth-viewing optics in place for the launch.

Um, have you run out of tinfoil? They don't need optics to read the thoughts from your brain from space man. That's the real cover. They just pay artists to create those "Hubble images" to add to the cover. /s

They can read and write by now.

hmmm, I thought they were WORM devices.

I like to think that the NRO has an AMAZING space telescope with the wrong set of sensors that they can’t use. Whoops.

There's basically no consequences for overclassification, but the penalty for underclassification could be a job loss (or in the extremely unlikely case, jail)

It could also risk death if it exposed anyone in the field

Maybe some direct successor to the technology is active or maybe there is something still have not been discovered by civilian competition?

Maybe they promised some ally that they didn't have this tech back then and don't want to reveal the lie.

Part of that is that 1960's tech was pretty good. It's not going to give you an advantage over the state of the art but it is still very useful and a whole lot better than nothing.

To erase intent, blame, liability, and responsibility.

Just imagine what a time traveler could do with that information.

Pretty much any information is much more valuable if you can go back in time.

title should be "its" not "it's"

Thanks! That always confuses me

If you can't substitute it for "it is" without it sounding weird, then you don't need the apostrophe. It was hard for me too when dealing with possessive words which usually have the apostrophe.

It's fixed now. Thanks!

The NRO is very spooky. Word on the street is that their tech is decades ahead of what is publicly available. I personally wonder what kind of crazy capabilities they have all the time.

This is going to sound stupid, but I think the NRO may have photonic supercomputers that are being used in combination with satellites to scrape the activity of every computer on the planet. They have had programs such as TEMPEST for years which aim to understand what a computer is doing through analysis of it's EM emissions. Imagine a satellite network tuned to these frequencies, pointed at the ground at all times, collecting and analyzing what all computers are doing all the time using unfathomable processing power - I think such a thing may be feasible.

Another cool spook program is SENTIENT which is also under the NRO. It is an automated intelligence analysis system which monitors the globe autonomously. Check out the movie "Eagle Eye" for IMO a pretty accurate depiction of what this system may look like in practice.

The NRO struggles to put normal reconnaissance satellites in the sky[1]. Special satellites with enough juice to Van Eck your screen from LEO (or HEO) feels like a stretch. All things being equal, it's probably easier for the USG (or any government) to just MITM you or exploit the crappy router in your closet.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Imagery_Architecture

I personally am always skeptical whenever I see a "cancelled" program like this. It is a near certainty that some officially cancelled programs continued development in the classified world, such as the SR-72 or the UCAV.

Admittedly I know nothing, and it's probable that I'm just blowing air out my ass. But I would LOVE to believe that the USG has got some crazy tech up their sleeve. Because hopefully one day they will declassify it and allow for commercial development, just like they did with computers and the internet.

> I think the NRO may have photonic supercomputers that are being used in combination with satellites to scrape the activity of every computer on the planet.

All this Tech and yet people in Russia are able to influence the US elections. I just find that very amusing.

Wasn't Eagle Eye based on ECHELON?

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