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(U) Too Much of a Good Thing?
FROM: Customer Outreach and Advocacy, Menwith Hill Station (F77)
Unknown
Run Date: 08/10/2006
(S//SI) Menwith Hill's COUNTRYSTORE project looks for ways to make the sorting, storage and
retrieval of data more efficient and effective.
(S//SI) Just over a decade ago, most folks within the intelligence community believed we would
suffer from a dearth of signal data from which to extract SIGINT. They thought the use of fiber
optic cabling would fully replace satellite communications, thus making the intercept of our highthreat targets more problematic. This, coupled with the increased use of sophisticated,
commercially available cryptography, was viewed as the "beginning of the end" of easily
exploited target communication paths.
(S//SI) Flash forward to where we find ourselves today. The commercial satellite communication
business is alive and well and bursting at the seams with increasingly sophisticated bulk DNI
(Digital Network Intelligence) traffic that is largely unencrypted. This data source alone provides
more data for Menwith Hill analysts to sift through than our entire enterprise had to deal with in
the not-so-distant past. To twist a phrase, it would appear that communication begets
communication.
(S//SI) What's the problem, you ask? More data is a good thing, right? Well, anyone who has
ever spent time on search engines like Google¿ might get a hint at the problem. Accessing too
much data does not necessarily lead to good information upon which to make good decisions (or
in our case, good SIGINT) unless you know what to keep and what to throw out.
(S//SI) How do you sort through the gigabytes of data that we collect on a daily basis and figure
out the best bits to keep that will lead you to better understand or learn about new targets of
interest? We've proven we can't keep it all, and even if we did, we don't have all the tools and
technology in place to help us intelligently sift through the data to support the various types of
development that we would like to accomplish. So what's a forward-looking SIGDEV site (like
Menwith Hill) to do? Using a few familiar colloquialisms, simply figure out a way to "separate the
wheat from the chaff," while making sure you "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
(S//SI) This is not a new problem for NSA. However, it is a problem that Menwith Hill has
recently begun committing resources to in the form of its latest SKYLAB initiative known as
COUNTRYSTORE. Although the problem is not new, the signals and data content within those
signals are continuously changing as commercial communication vendors come up with new and
innovative ways of pushing more data through satellites.
(S//SI) The objective of the COUNTRYSTORE initiative is to work with a broad range of SIGDEV
stakeholders and determine a set of "business rules" to thin out the data that we store at site.
By doing this, it will allow us to apply subsequent analytics to this reduced set of data in a more
efficient and effective manner. Once these business rules are discovered and quantified, the
second phase of this initiative will be to codify them in software that will allow this intelligent
data reduction to actually occur.
(S//SI) For more information on this project, or if you are interested in helping, please contact
either
) or
. A core team of skilled individuals is
being assembled to tackle this initiative. The team leads would like to hear any "great ideas"
you might have on how to make this project a success.
(U//FOUO) Menwith Hill Station
POC:
)
(U//FOUO) This article is reprinted from Menwith Hill Station's Horizon newsletter, August
edition.
"(U//FOUO) SIDtoday articles may not be republished or reposted outside NSANet
without the consent of S0121 (DL sid_comms)."
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DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108