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(S) Putting PROFORMA on a Par With Other COMINT and ELINT
FROM: Jennifer Cloutier
Chief, National PROFORMA Operations Center (SD22)
Run Date: 10/05/2006
(S//SI//REL) Analysts: The new NPOC may be able to help you find relevant PROFORMA to add
to your reporting, giving a more complete picture...
(S//SI//REL) Would you (or would your customers) like to know what targets China's over-thehorizon (OTH) radars are tracking? Interested in the command and control network regulating
the power grid for one of India's nuclear research facilities? How about the location, speed,
heading, and fuel level of the North Korean supply ship suspected of transferring WMD-related
cargo to Iran? If so, PROFORMA* may be able to give you those answers, and the newly
established National PROFORMA Operations Center (NPOC) within the National Technical SIGINT
Operations Center** at NSA/CSS Colorado will soon be ready to help.
(U) The Plan
(S) Charged as the operational complement to the technical analysis and exploitation mission
performed by the Joint PROFORMA Center, the NPOC will work with the appropriate data
acquisition, signals development, customer relations organizations, and regional and target
offices of primary concern (OPC) to enable the operational use of PROFORMA throughout the
community, with the ultimate goal of making the incorporation of PROFORMA as common
as using COMINT and ELINT today. In order to achieve this, the NPOC will focus its support
in three main functional areas:
Mission Management : Ensuring the collection assets across the Enterprise are optimized
for discovery efforts and time-sensitive and routine collection of PROFORMA signals in
support of customer requirements.
Customer Support : Serving as the "front door" to the community for opPROFORMA
issues and requests and providing the education, training and guidance on what
PROFORMA can do and how to use it.
Data Management : Ensuring our customers get the data they need, and that the data is
valid. Also, ensuring that analysts have the tools, databases and working aids necessary
to perform operational analysis of the PROFORMA, and that they are able to integrate it
with other intelligence to produce the most complete analysis possible.
(U) The Steps
(S) As a new organization, the NPOC stand-up will be in stages. Initially, we will ensure that the
Intelligence Needs that can currently be satisfied with PROFORMA data are properly tasked and
coordinated with appropriate OPC's, and then assist as necessary on helping analysts to
understand, integrate, and report the PROFORMA data. As the NPOC progresses, we will expand
our services to include:
provision of a formal opPROFORMA analysis curriculum;
customer outreach programs;
the creation of a PROFORMA Knowledge Base;
development of easily accessible, user-friendly PROFORMA analysis tools that allow
analysts to query, display and fuse PROFORMA information with other SIGINT and
collateral data; and
coordination on signal and target development efforts.
(S//SI/REL) This last piece, while extremely time and resource intensive, is essential to
expanding current PROFORMA exploitation capabilities (now largely concentrated on weapons
systems and air navigation targets) into other applications and intelligence problems such as the
SCADA*** networks mentioned in the theoretical Indian example. This collaborative PROFORMA
signal and target development function will also assist in the search for new instances of more
traditional types of targets. Such is the case with the need to discover the network passing
tracking data from China's OTH radars, to allow NSA/CSS Hawaii to provide tip-offs to U.S.
vessels and aircraft operating in the Pacific theater.
(U) The Goal
(S//SI//REL) Examples of the types of reporting the NPOC hopes to encourage across the
Enterprise can currently be found in various, but limited, reporting offices. For instance,
(S//SI//REL) The Maritime Analysis Support Team (MAST) depends heavily on PROFORMA
exploitation of the JEEPNEY signal, which communicates ship-borne Automatic
Identification System information. They use it to track over 900 commercial ships of
interest to SIGINT consumers worldwide, including ships inbound towards US territories
that are of interest to the Department of Homeland Security;
(S//SI//REL) At NSA/CSS Georgia, the Israel/Lebanon/PLO target shop used various
Syrian and commercial PROFORMA sources with voice and ELINT to alert US Central
Command to Israeli Air Force operational sorties (e.g. report 2/CY/2366-06) by fighter,
reconnaissance, and unmanned aerial vehicles during the most recent Israeli/Hezbollah
crisis. They also followed the flights of Iranian commercial aircraft suspected of ferrying
C-802 cruise missile contraband from Tehran to Damascus.
(U//FOUO) The NPOC can be reached by sending email to "
or by typing " go npoc ".
We look forward to hearing from interested offices and analysts, providing assistance in
utilizing the PROFORMA that's currently available, and helping develop those new PROFORMA
targets that may help solve some of today's intelligence problems.
(U) Notes:
*PROFORMA: (U) As a subset of COMINT, PROFORMA encompasses machine-generated,
formatted data communications that convey information derived from sensors and/or
control systems.
"(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