[Infowarrior] - Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs

[Richard Forno]

Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs

15 September 2014 by Robert Sesek

The NSA TURBULENCE program was first revealed in 2007 by the Baltimore Sun for being over-budget and poorly-managed [1][2]. Many documents from the Snowden trove from the past two years reference parts of this program, but no coherent story or overview of how these programs operate together has been described. This is an attempt to do so, using leaked and declassified documents.

At the time the Sun reported on TURBULENCE in 2007, it had an annual cost approaching $500 million dollars, and it was comprised of nine smaller programs [1]; this article covers five of those that have been revealed to date. The predecessor program to TURBULENCE was called TRAILBLAZER, and it was shut down for cost overruns and mismanagement [3]. The TURBULENCE leadership chose to use “several smaller programs [as] a way to hedge bets on uncertain technology” [2], unlike TRAILBLAZER which was a monolithic project. While TURBULENCE was reported to have had a rocky start, it is now clearly operational and central to NSA’s 21st century SIGINT mission.

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https://robert.sesek.com/2014/9/unraveling_nsa_s_turbulence_programs.html

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