File of Declassified NSA EXECmessages Now Available Online

September 7, 2016

The website governmentattic.org has place online a file of 195 pages of declassified NSA EXECmessages covering the period 2006-2008. These messages, most of which were unclassified, were disseminated to senior NSA officials describing organizational and personnel changes taking place inside the Agency. security issues, and other related matters.

While the vast majority of the messages are mundane (at best), there are a few that caught my eye:

* A December 4, 2006 message entitled “NSA/CSS Operations Centers,” which provides some interesting materials on NSA’s three most important ops centers: the National Security Operations Center (NSOC), then headed by Lonny A. Anderson; the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC), headed by William P. Marshall; and the Counterterrorism Mission Management Center (CT MMC), whose identity remains classified.

* An August 8, 2007 message from NSA’s general counsel, Vito t. Potenza, entitled “A Step Toward FISA Modernization,” which lays out why NSA thought the revised FISA legislation just passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on August 5, 2007 was so great. In light of what we have learned since the first Snowden leaks came out in 2013, you have to wonder if the legislation, which gave retroactive immunity to all the telecomm companies working with NSA on domestic and international eavesdropping programs, was such a good idea.

* A January 17, 2006 message entitled “Approval of the Cryptologic Expeditionary Force (CEF),” which details how NSA had created a small core of military and civilian personnel who deploy rapidly anywhere around the world to conduct SIGINT collection operations as part of the so-called Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), especially to the US Central Command (CENTCOM) AOR in the Middle East and Near East.

* A January 5, 2006 message (“SID’s Progress with Mission Alignment”), which described the dramatic organizational and functional changes that were then taking place inside the NSA Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) and its four major domestic SIGINT collection centers in Hawaii, Texas, Georgia and Hawaii, which NSA obliquely referred to as “Mission Alignment." Sadly, much of this message was deleted by NSA security officials, but enough of the text survives to gauge the nature and extent of the changes that were then taking place inside SID.

The complete file of NSA EXECmessages can be viewed here.