Charlie Meals will travel to England for site visits and meetings with the GCHQ.

The Signals Intelligence Director reports back about the key lesson learned from the annual SIGINT Site Commanders Operational Review conference. SIGINT leaders flew into Fort Meade from all of NSA's field offices, also called the Extended Enterprise, to discuss the largest problems facing the global SIGINT network. They concluded that NSA must become "an organization that is truly a network of collaborative partners instead of one based strictly on traditional hierarchies or a hub-spoke structure."

SID supported the final work of the 9/11 Commission by identifying classified information in the draft report and proposing alternative wording to dissociate the intelligence facts from NSA or SIGINT.

Pick-Your-Own-Number is a new feature made possible by VoIP providers such as Vonage, and as of 2004 rapidly gaining in popularity. Now that this phenomenon is taking off, it means that phone numbers no longer reliably correspond to the country of the subscriber. "Theoretically," the author writes, "Usama bin Laden could be using a U.S.-based number while located in Afghanistan!" This has legal complications for NSA, because they need to be able to spy on international targets, but USSID-18 regulations forbid them from spying on domestic targets. The author suggests that NSA could partner with law enforcement agencies, such as FBI, to target domestic phone numbers using the domestic surveillance law known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

Hundreds of members of the intelligence community attended the 2004 SIGINT Development Conference. Some positive feedback is detailed.

NSA contributions to the Combined Federal Campaign charities surpassed the $1.6 million goal for 2004. And a SID employee guessed the exact number of candies in a huge glass jar: 1,266.

226 people have responded to the Information Needs survey so far.

The NSA opened an engineering support facility at Yokota Air Base in Japan. The $6.6 million facility, paid for almost entirely by the Japanese government, produces and repairs antennas for NSA operations across the globe.

The SID People Office and the SIGINT Support Requirements Division have merged their missions.

If SID managers find they have a budget shortfall, they can submit requests to be considered through the unfunded request process. Requests will be placed in a queue and considered by several approval groups.

In the summer of 2004, DIRNSA got new responsibilities. In addition to computer network exploitation, which involved hacking networks and extracting information, NSA will be in charge of computer network attack, which are "operations to disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy information resident in computers and computer networks, or the computers and networks themselves." Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden established the Network Attack Support Staff organization to support these responsibilities.

Announcing a job vacancies at the CIA to prepare intelligence to brief the president. One of the perks is getting to meet interesting people: "In just the last month, baseball star Cal Ripken Jr. and movie celebrity Robert DeNiro [sic] were both here."

A classics professor who changed careers to intern at the NSA reflects on the many opportunities to grow and learn at the agency in contrast to the restrictiveness of academia.

(Repost) Description of life in fast-paced midtown Manhattan, where NSA representatives serve customers such as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and FBI New York.

NSA hosted a conference on cryptanalytic support to law enforcement for partners from all Five Eyes countries, including representatives from general counsel, policy, cryptanalytic offices, and representatives of FBI, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the UK's National Technical Assistance Center.

This month's NSA China Forum, entitled "Chinese Oil Diplomacy and its Impact on Geopolitics" will analyze the impact of China's oil shortage on its diplomatic policies.

The High Power Cordless Phone Analysis cell was founded in 2003 after use of these "poor man's cellular" phones proliferated in the early 2000s. Analysts with this cell provide training about HPCP communication to other NSA staff, analyze intercepted communications, and develop new tools for working with this technology.

SID's deputy director for Data Acquisition gives an update on what his department has been doing. He points out that the capture of terrorist Umar Baziyani was an example of seamless interaction between many diverse parts of NSA, an operation that included "cryptoanalytic exploitation using special purpose hardware." He outlines some of Data Acquisition's activities to build tools and infrastructure to make similar operations much easier in the future, including the establishment of the Global Network Forum, "a 5 Eyes construct to manage midpoint accesses on a community basis."

A cross-SID meeting to discuss the National SIGINT Requirements Process will be held in January, and staff should submit topics for conversation.

Announcement of a seminar on the "enduring and enigmatic" Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

SID Director Richard Quirk will conduct group sessions to discuss diversity among SID personnel.

Announcement of a seminar on state-on-state warfare and the costs (monetary and otherwise) of new weapons systems and tactics.

Raul gives advice to Digital Network Intelligence analysts about squeezing the most value out of Microsoft Office document metadata. He shows examples from Word and Excel documents and explains how you can use pieces of metadata to track down all documents by a specific author, or specific company, without even having an email address or other hard selectors.

The author of the article writes to correct it, saying that the article did not reflect the information he provided.

The author describes SID's comprehensive strategy to attack wireless technology -- personal communication devices like cell phones, satellite phones, trunk mobile radio, and Wi-Fi -- which were rapidly growing in popularity. By the end of 2002, the Wireless Portfolio Management Office was established, and they have since spent considerable resources and have made considerable progress.

(Repost) NSA employees describe some out-of-the-ordinary jobs -- such as puppeteering, long-haul trucking, and paper sorting -- that they held prior to joining the agency.

Description of an approach to sifting through large amounts of phone call metadata to find leads for new surveillance target called "GEO Mining." The author gives an example of searching for heroin-production labs in Afghanistan using GEO Mining, by filtering all phone calls in Afghanistan down to calls made near known heroin-processing labs. In this case, "The top 20 handsets were then tasked for collection, and at least one has produced reportable intelligence."

A team of technical directors and senior managers was formed to consider the role of technical directors.

SIGINT collection is governed by United States Signals Intelligence Directives, many of which are outdated or missing information. The SIGINT Policy team is currently identifying current practices that are not addressed in any USSIDs to date and creating a new organizational system for USSIDs so they are grouped by subject and more easily findable.

NSA lacks enough skilled cryptologic language analysts, hurting its mission in the war on terror. Only half of the 2,300 language missions worldwide have qualified personnel. The article introduces a series on this topic.