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Originally Posted by finnbow
As I said earlier, I was the project engineer on a number of NSA and INSCOM (the Army subsidiary of NSA) projects in Germany. At one facility, they used a gigantic antenna array (~1500 feet in diameter) to record and triangulate armed forces radio transmission from the Warsaw Pact countries. Their high speed computers would sort the transmissions for those containing key words. These were analyzed by "Language Experts," servicemen who took intensive language training at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey.
I knew several of the German language "experts" who would analyze stuff from the former East Germany. Their German language skills were, at best, at a Kindergarten level. Really. They could barely speak beyond the words necessary to order a beer in a Gasthaus. I suspect that it isn't much different for those at the NSA when it comes to the myriad dialects of Arabic, Pashtun, Farsi, etc.
Keep in mind that this type of listening was happening for decades all over the globe by NSA and combined with human intel from the CIA. They still didn't predict the fall of the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall. |
Back when I played with ham radio I recall seeing a bunch of ICOM R-7000 receivers for sale on ebay. The seller said they were from a government monitoring station. That was when analog cell phones were unencrypted in the 800 MHz band. Those ICOM radios could receive them.
It's easy to imagine that such spying has continued and probably grown, particularly with the internet.