The Crime Scene Investigation

CHAPTER 14 The Crime Scene Investigation Any private contractor, not even an employee of the government, could walk into the NSA building, take whatever they wanted, and walk out with it and they would never know. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014 | aaa MILES NORTHWEST of Honolulu on the island of Oahu, adjacent to the sprawling Wheeler Air Force Base, is a 250,000- square-foot, man-made mound of earth and reinforced concrete sur- rounded by an electrified fence. Inside the mound is a three-story structure originally built by the air force in World War II as a bomb- proof aircraft repair facility. In the Cold War, it was modernized to withstand enemy chemical, biological, radiological, or electromag- netic pulse attacks and was used by the navy’s operation center for its Pacific fleet. After the Cold War, the huge edifice was turned over to the NSA, which, as stated earlier, had been created as an intelli- gence service to intercept the communications and signals of foreign countries after World War II, a mission that included vacuuming into its giant computer arrays telephone messages, missile telem- etry, submarine signals, and virtually everything on the electro- magnetic spectrum of interest to the U.S. Defense Department and USS. intelligence agencies. As the NSA developed it, this Hawaiian base became one of its primary regional bases for gathering Asian | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 134 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019622