What Life Was Like Inside the Hexagon Project 104
As new submitter kulnor writes, "Hexagon, a cold war secret project around spy satellites to monitor USSR was declassified last September." kulnor excerpts from the AP story as carried by Yahoo, outlining how more than 1,000 people in and around Danbury, CT kept mum about the nature of their employment: "'For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets. They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized 'cleanroom' where the equipment was stored. They spoke in code.' As more and more WWII and cold war secrets are declassified, we learn about amazing technological feats involving hundreds of people working in secrecy. I wonder what will emerge in a few decades around modern IT, the Internet, hacks, and the like." Every time I visit Oak Ridge, TN, I am amazed by the same phenomenon of successful large-scale secrecy.
Re:The fore front of technlogiy. (Score:5, Informative)
...or was this a bit of a power-play between different branches of the government not sharing or not wanting to give up control over something.
More likely it was different mission capabilities. The aircraft's course can be effectively altered on short notice. This increases both it's flexibility (altering the course of an orbiting satellite is nothing if not ponderous) and perhaps more importantly, it's unpredictability. If you know that a possible recon satellite passes over every n hours, you hide your stuff at that time. Habu could show up with much less, if any, notice.
Re:The fore front of technlogiy. (Score:5, Informative)
In addition, the article mentions that a full-frame image from a KH-9 could cover an area over 300 miles across. That kind of wide-field view if important militarily in a way that complements the closer-up images from spy aircraft.
The SR-71 has a somewhat smaller radar cross-section than you'd expect for such a large aircraft, but it was hardly stealthy: the USSR and China could know exactly when they were overflown by it. They could also know pretty well when a spy satellite would be overhead of a certain area, but couldn't always be sure if it was taking photos during each pass. This meant that they always has to assume that their military sites were under continuous surveillance, even if they weren't, and expend significant resources to counteract that. Same, too, on our side.
Although the SR-71 could get most anywhere on the globe within a day, so long as the orbit inclination is right (they were mostly polar orbits, I would guess) you are pretty much guaranteed to have a satellite pass within 12-24 hours anyway. And once it is launched, the bird is always up there: you don't have to worry much about staging it the way you do with a limited number of aircraft. There may have been places too deep inside the USSR and China for the SR-71 or U-2 to reach.
So, in short, one could conclude that the military wanted a variety of intelligence gathering options for breadth, depth, redundancy, and theatrics. The fact that there was a lot of money available for such things, which could be spread across a lot of agencies and a congressional districts, probably didn't hurt, either. They didn't have to choose among options: they could opt to do them all.
Classification and accountability (Score:5, Informative)
Given the size of the US government, there have to be documents that no-one alive knows about anymore, because everyone who had access died before they should have been released. ... Even if found, since there's nobody left who understands the document, it would remain classified. (Or does the Government automatically declassified information it doesn't understand, or does it just destroy the document?)
Every Original Classification decision includes the date at which the information is to be automatically declassified. Every classified document is supposed to be marked with a reference to the document which made the Original Classification decision, and the date at which it becomes declassified. All classified documents are supposed to be physically inventoried twice a year, and that inventory reported upstream. So for classified documents, the situation you describe would be less likely. Not impossible -- people don't always follow the rules, to be sure -- but less likely.
Most people who haven't worked with this stuff don't understand that classification is as much about accountability as it is about confidentiality. There's a huge paper trail associated with classification.
But not everything secret (lower-case "s") is necessarily classified. There could well be stuff that's locked up and long-forgotten precisely *because* it hasn't been formally classified, and thus isn't subject to all the above.
Re:The fore front of technlogiy. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Keeping a secret (Score:5, Informative)
How ironic that you only mention two of the buildings, considering the WTC report fails to mention (much less attempt to explain!) Building 7 as well!
Why do you say that? The NIST report certainly does.
http://www.nist.gov/el/disasterstudies/wtc/faqs_wtc7.cfm [nist.gov]