Dishfire
Dishfire is a covert global surveillance collection system and database run by the United States of America's National Security Agency and the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters that collects hundreds of millions of text messages on a daily basis from around the world. A related analytic tool is known as Prefer; the database is operated by the following agencies: United States of America - National Security Agency United Kingdom - Government Communications Headquarters The existence of the database was revealed in 2014 based on documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. According to Snowden's documents, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters has been given full access to the Dishfire database, which the agency uses to obtain personal information of Britons by exploiting a legal loophole; each day, Dishfire collects the following amounts of data: Geolocation data of more than 76,000 text messages and other travel information Over 110,000 names, gathered from electronic business cards Over 800,000 financial transactions that are either gathered from text-to-text payments or from linking credit cards to phone users Details of 1.6 million border crossings based on the interception of network roaming alerts Over 5 million missed call alerts About 200 million text messages from around the worldThe press highlighted some quotes from the internal presentations highlighting the intent of this operation: one leaked GCHQ document said that DISHFIRE “collects pretty much everything it can, so you can see SMS from a selector, not targeted.”
The bulk collection was therefore suggested in this document as “particularly useful for the development of new targets, since it is possible to examine the content of messages sent months or years before the target was known to be of interest.” In response, a spokeswoman of the NSA describes the database as follows: "Dishfire is a system that processes and stores lawfully collected SMS data. Because some SMS data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire." Dishfire is exploited with an analytical tool known as the Prefer program, which processes SMS messages to extract information including contacts from missed call alerts, location from roaming and travel alerts, financial information from bank alerts and payments, names from electronic business cards. A Vodafone representative declared in the breaking news story on Channel 4 that “It’s the first we’ve heard about it and we’re shocked and surprised.”
He went on to say that Dishfire was circumventing UK law. According to Channel 4's Geoff White, "the Dishfire system gives GCHQ a legal loophole to get such information without needing a RIPA request. That's because the text messages are gathered and stored by the NSA - and GCHQ's access to foreign intelligence agencies' stash of data is not covered by any UK law." Former UK Interception Commissioner Sir Swinton Thomas drew an analogy between this method of circumventing the UK interception laws and torture in a foreign country, adding that it was a “different area of course, but the concept is similar”. FASCIA Five Eyes Mass surveillance Mass surveillance in the United Kingdom Mass surveillance in the United States MUSCULAR, another NSA–GCHQ collaboration targeting Google and Yahoo private cloud traffic Stateroom
Michael S. Rogers
Michael S. Rogers is a former United States Navy admiral who served as the second commander of the U. S. Cyber Command, he concurrently served as the 17th director of the National Security Agency and as chief of the Central Security Service from April 3, 2014. Prior to that, Rogers served as the Commander of the Tenth Fleet and Commander of the U. S. Fleet Cyber Command. During his tenure, he helped transform and elevate U. S. Cyber Command into a unified combatant command, he relinquished command on May 2018 to his successor, Paul Nakasone. He retired from active duty in the United States Navy on June 1, 2018. Rogers is a native of Chicago, Illinois, he graduated from New Trier High School in 1977. He is a graduate of the Naval War College. Rogers received his commission through the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps program and has served in the United States Navy since graduating from Auburn University in 1981, he started his career as a Surface Warfare Officer working in naval gunfire support operations off Grenada and maritime surveillance operations off El Salvador on board the USS Caron.
In 1986, he was selected for transfer from Unrestricted Line Officer to Restricted Line Officer and re-designation as a cryptology officer. During the 2003 U. S. invasion of Iraq, Rogers joined the military's Joint Staff, which works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he specialized in computer network attacks. From 2007 onward he served as director of intelligence for the military's Pacific Command. In 2009, he became director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was subsequently named commander of U. S. Fleet Cyber Command and commander of the U. S. 10th Fleet, with responsibility for all of the Navy's cyberwarfare efforts. As such, Rogers was the first restricted line officer to serve as a numbered fleet commander and the first Information Warfare Community officer to achieve the rank of vice admiral. In January 2014, the Obama Administration announced Rogers' nomination as director of the National Security Agency and the commander of the United States offensive cyberoperations unit in the Department of Defense.
Rogers succeeded General Keith B. Alexander, who served as the NSA director for nine years, became the first IWC officer to achieve the rank of admiral. Although the NSA directorship does not require Senate approval, Rogers had to be confirmed by the Senate to head United States Cyber Command, for which the Senate unanimously confirmed him. In his first public remarks as NSA director, Rogers stated that he believed that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was "probably not" working for a foreign intelligence agency, despite frequent speculation and assertion by the NSA's allies to the contrary. Rogers added: "He believes in what he's doing. I question that. I fundamentally disagree with. I believe. Carter recommended he be terminated due to poor performance, whereas Clapper considered it wise that the position be held by a civilian. Both Clapper and Carter had put Rogers on notice for poor performance in internal security and leadership style. Others have contended that the real reason Clapper and Carter wanted Rogers fired is because he was a whistleblower, having initiated an Inspector General investigation and subsequent report to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court about a sustained pattern during the Obama Administration of illegally performed searches on U.
S. Persons by improperly using FISA Section 702 authorities; this belief is buttressed by the IG report and by the April 26, 2017 U. S. FISA Court "Memorandum Opinion and Order." The declassified version of that document states "The October 26, 2016 Notice disclosed that an NSA Inspector General review and report and NSA Office of Comliance for Operations verification activities indicated that, with greater frequency than disclosed to the Court, NSA analysts had used U. S.-person identifiers to query the results of Internet'upstream' collection though NSA's Section 702 minimization procedures prohibited such queries. To understand why such queries were prohibited, why this disclosure gave the Court substantial concern, some historical background is necessary." The report goes on to state "At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government's failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional'lack of candor' on NSA's part and emphasized that'this is a serious Fourth Amendment issue'".
As a result of these transgressions, there were "changes in the scope of NSA collection under Section 702, as reflected in the March 30, 2017 Amendments". These changes were designed to prevent recurrence of the illegal collection discussed in the Court filing. Other sources contend that Admiral Rogers' termination was delayed due to stalled changes to the bureaucratic structure of the intelligence community. Before the recommendation of firing was made, Rogers met with President-elect Donald Trump without notifying his superiors; some sources contend that the reason he did not notify Mr. Clapper was the fact he was alerting President Elect Trump about Mr. Clapper's illegal actions with respect to FISA Section 702. Trump was considering replacing Clapper with Rogers as DNI, however that position went to former Senator Dan Coats, with Rogers remainin
PRISM (surveillance program)
PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency collects Internet communications from various US Internet companies. The program is known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to Internet companies such as Google LLC under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms; the NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the Internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, to get data, easier to handle, among other things. PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration; the program is operated under the supervision of the U. S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, its existence was leaked six years by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who warned that the extent of mass data collection was far greater than the public knew and included what he characterized as "dangerous" and "criminal" activities.
The disclosures were published by The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013. Subsequent documents have demonstrated a financial arrangement between the NSA's Special Source Operations division and PRISM partners in the millions of dollars. Documents indicate that PRISM is "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports", it accounts for 91% of the NSA's Internet traffic acquired under FISA section 702 authority." The leaked information came to light one day after the revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over to the NSA logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls. U. S. Government officials have disputed some aspects of the Guardian and Washington Post stories and have defended the program by asserting it cannot be used on domestic targets without a warrant, that it has helped to prevent acts of terrorism, that it receives independent oversight from the federal government's executive and legislative branches.
On June 19, 2013, U. S. President Barack Obama, during a visit to Germany, stated that the NSA's data gathering practices constitute "a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people." PRISM was publicly revealed when classified documents about the program were leaked to journalists of The Washington Post and The Guardian by Edward Snowden – at the time an NSA contractor – during a visit to Hong Kong. The leaked documents included 41 PowerPoint slides; the documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012. The speaker's notes in the briefing document reviewed by The Washington Post indicated that "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo and Microsoft"; the slide presentation stated that much of the world's electronic communications pass through the U. S. because electronic communications data tend to follow the least expensive route rather than the most physically direct route, the bulk of the world's Internet infrastructure is based in the United States.
The presentation noted that these facts provide United States intelligence analysts with opportunities for intercepting the communications of foreign targets as their electronic data pass into or through the United States. Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ undertook mass interception and tracking of Internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true – allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities and private businesses", alleged that compliance offered only limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, can change at any time", adding that "Additionally, audits are cursory and fooled by fake justifications", with numerous self-granted exceptions, that NSA policies encourage staff to assume the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty.
Below are a number of slides released by Edward Snowden showing the operation and processes behind the PRISM program. It should be noted that the "FAA" referred to is Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, not the Federal Aviation Administration, more known by the same FAA initialism; the French newspaper Le Monde disclosed new PRISM slides coming from the "PRISM/US-984XN Overview" presentation on October 21, 2013. The British newspaper The Guardian disclosed new PRISM slides in November 2013 which on the one hand compares PRISM with the Upstream program, on the other hand deals with collaboration between the NSA's Threat Operations Center and the FBI. Wikimedia Commons keeps copies of the leaked PowerPoint slides here: Commons:Category:PRISM along with other associated documents. PRISM is a program from the Special Source Operations division of the NSA, which in the tradition of NSA's intelligence alliances, cooperates with as many as 100 trusted U. S. companies since the 1970s. A prior program, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, was implemented in the wake of the September 11 attacks under the George W. Bush Administration but was criticized and challenged as illega
Bad Aibling Station
The Bad Aibling Station is a satellite tracking station operated by the German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst in Bad Aibling, Bavaria. Created by the Western Allies in 1947, it was run by the U. S. National Security Agency until the early 2000s, when operations were transferred to the BND due to public outrage over U. S. surveillance operations in Germany. As part of the global surveillance network ECHELON, Bad Aibling is the largest listening post outside Britain and the USA. In 1936 a military airfield was established by the German National Socialist government on the site of a sport airfield in Bad Aibling-Mietraching. After the Second World War, troops of the United States Army seized the military airport that had evolved from the airfield, it was used by the occupying Americans as a camp for prisoners of war. Günter Grass and Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI, are alleged to have met there as prisoners. After the last prisoners had been discharged in 1946, the grounds of the airbase were transformed into a displaced persons camp for former members of the Royal Yugoslav Army, deported to Germany during the war.
The Bad Aibling DP camp was first run by UNRRA and by the IRO. In 1948, the Yugoslav DPs were transferred to another DP camp in Munich, making room for a new relief project: the IRO Children's Village Bad Aibling, which housed over 2,300 unaccompanied children and youth who had had been displaced during or as a result of the war, who represented more than 20 nationalities. An international team of relief workers, including a group of Quakers from the AFSC, took care of the children until the Village was closed in late 1951. In 1952, the area was taken over by the US Army. Since a four-power agreement enacted Austria's neutrality in 1955, US listening devices that were situated there had to be abandoned, they were relocated to Bad Aibling and during the Cold War field station 81 was converted by the United States Army Security Agency to a central communications monitoring station for American intelligence. In 1971 the National Security Agency and the United States Department of Defense took over command from the U.
S. Army; the Army Security Agency transferred most of its activities in West Germany from its field stations located at Rothwesten, Bad Aibling and Herzogenaurach to Augsburg. In 1994, the NSA transferred command of its Bad Aibling base to INSCOM, one of the Central Security Services of United States. After the end of the Cold War, on several occasions including investigations of the European Parliament that censured industrial espionage by American secret services, the Americans intended to close the Bad Aibling Station; the September 11, 2001 attacks delayed these plans. In the vicinity in Bad Aibling, a base of the Bundesnachrichtendienst has always been in existence within the area of former barracks of the Bundeswehr; the restructuring of the American intelligence community after the September 11, 2001 caused the closure of Bad Aibling Station on September 30, 2004. The base was returned to the Federal Republic of Germany. Information uncovered by Der Spiegel in 2013 from the Edward Snowden leaks indicated that the NSA continues to have a presence at Bad Aibling, supported by the BND.
The NSA functions are housed in a metal-clad building known colloquially as the "Tin Can". Different divisions of NSA TASCOM, APO 09108 / 09098 - Carl Mosher 1972 & 1973 HOC 718th Military Intelligence Brigade C COMPANY 66th Military Intelligence Group, Air Force-402ND Intelligence Squadron 108th Military Intelligence Group Navy-NSGA 18th USASAFS Field Station 312th ASA Battalion 320th ASA Battalion Headquarters Company 180th ASA Company 181st ASA Company 186st ASA Company British Royal Signals Detachment The Bad Aibling Station was an important monitoring station of the ECHELON System that employed up to 1000 staff members, its task was acquisition of information for American authorities and other allied intelligence services, e.g. from the United Kingdom. The López affair, cleared up by telephone surveillance in the BAS gained worldwide audience. According to official statements, the function of BAS was "Rapid Radio Relay and Secure Common, Support to DoD and Unified Commands and Longhand Common HF & Satellite, Communication Physics Research and Evaluate Common Equipment"Only few details are known.
Serious hints, support the assumption that the BAS supervised numerous communication channels, including wireless communication and internet traffic. The communication with satellites outside the Intelsat system, seems to have been monitored by the BAS. Message at military.com Information by US Army Security Agency Field Station Augsburg at the Wayback Machine Video of a trip through the remainders of BAS in 2011 on YouTube—seven years after its closing and dismantling
Keith B. Alexander
Keith Brian Alexander is a retired four-star general of the United States Army who served as director of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service and commander of the United States Cyber Command. He served as Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, U. S. Army from 2003 to 2005, he assumed the positions of Director, National Security Agency and Chief, Central Security Service on August 1, 2005 and the additional duties as Commander, United States Cyber Command on May 21, 2010. General Alexander announced his retirement on October 16, 2013, his retirement date was March 28, 2014. In May 2014, General Alexander founded IronNet Cybersecurity, a private-sector cybersecurity firm based in Fulton, Maryland. Alexander was born on December 2, 1951 in Syracuse, New York, the son of Charlotte L. and Donald Henry Alexander. He was raised in New York, a suburb of Syracuse, he was a paperboy for The Post-Standard and attended Westhill Senior High School track. He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, in his class were three other future four-star generals, David Petraeus, Martin Dempsey and Walter L. Sharp.
Just before graduation in April 1974, Alexander married Deborah Lynn Douglas, a classmate in high school and who grew up near his family in Onondaga Hill. They have four daughters, he entered active duty at West Point. Alexander's military education includes the Armor Officer Basic Course, the Military Intelligence Officer Advanced Course, the United States Army Command and General Staff College, the National War College. Alexander worked on signals intelligence at a number of secret National Security Agency bases in the United States and Germany, he earned an MS in business administration in 1978 from Boston University, an MS in systems technology and an MS in physics in 1983 from the Naval Postgraduate School, an MS in national security strategy from the National Defense University. He rose up the military ranks, due to his expertise in advanced technology and his competency at administration. Alexander's assignments include the Deputy Chief of Staff, Department of the Army, Washington, D. C. from 2003 to 2005.
S. Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Virginia from 2001 to 2003. Alexander served in a variety of command assignments in the United States; these include tours as Commander of 511th MI Battalion, 66th MI Group. Additionally, Alexander held key staff assignments as Deputy Director and Operations Officer, Executive Officer, 522nd MI Battalion, 2nd Armored Division, he served in Afghanistan on a peace keeping mission for the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. Alexander headed the Army Intelligence and Security Command, where in 2001 he was in charge of 10,700 spies and eavesdroppers worldwide. In the words of James Bamford, who wrote his biography for Wired, "Alexander and the rest of the American intelligence community suffered a devastating defeat when they were surprised by the attacks on 9/11." Alexander's reaction was to order his intercept operators to begin to monitor the email and phone calls of American citizens who were unrelated to terrorist threats, including the personal calls of journalists.
In 2003, he was named deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the U. S. Army; the 205th MI Brigade involved in the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse in Baghdad, Iraq was part of V Corps and not under Alexander's command. Testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Alexander called the abuse "totally reprehensible" and described the perpetrators as a "group of undisciplined MP soldiers". Mary Louise Kelly, who interviewed him for NPR, said that because he was "outside the chain of command that oversaw interrogations in Iraq", Alexander was able to survive with his "reputation intact". In 2004, along with Alberto Gonzales and others in the George W. Bush administration, Alexander presented a memorandum that sought to justify the treatment of those who were deemed "unlawful enemy combatants". In June 2013, the National Security Agency was revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden to be secretly spying on the American people with FISA-approved surveillance programs, such as PRISM and XKeyscore.
On October 16, 2013, it was publicly announced that Alexander and his deputy, Chris Inglis were leaving the NSA. On April 13, 2016, President Obama announced Alexander as a member of his Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. Alexander became a three-star general. In 2005, Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, named him Director of the National Security Agency. There, according to Bamford, Alexander deceived the House Intelligence Committee when his agency was involved in NSA warrantless wiretapping. During this period, Alexander oversaw the implementation of the Real Time Regional Gateway in Iraq, an NSA data collection program that consisted of gathering all electronic communication, storing it, searching and otherwise analyzing it. A former senior U. S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was,'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it... And whatever it is you wan
Global surveillance disclosures (2013–present)
Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the United States National Security Agency and its international partners' global surveillance of both foreign nationals and U. S. citizens. The reports emanate from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which he obtained whilst working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States. In addition to a trove of U. S. federal documents, Snowden's cache contains thousands of Australian and Canadian intelligence files that he had accessed via the exclusive "Five Eyes" network. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published by The Washington Post and The Guardian, attracting considerable public attention; the disclosure continued throughout 2013, a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel, O Globo, Le Monde, L'espresso, NRC Handelsblad, Dagbladet, El País, Sveriges Television.
These media reports have shed light on the implications of several secret treaties signed by members of the UKUSA community in their efforts to implement global surveillance. For example, Der Spiegel revealed how the German Foreign Intelligence Service transfers "massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA", while Swedish Television revealed the National Defence Radio Establishment provided the NSA with data from its cable collection, under a secret treaty signed in 1954 for bilateral cooperation on surveillance. Other security and intelligence agencies involved in the practice of global surveillance include those in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Singapore as well as Israel, which receives raw, unfiltered data of U. S. citizens, shared by the NSA. On June 14, 2013, United States prosecutors charged Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property. In late July 2013, he was granted a one-year temporary asylum by the Russian government, contributing to a deterioration of Russia–United States relations.
On August 6, 2013, U. S. President Barack Obama made a public appearance on national television where he told Americans that "We don't have a domestic spying program" and that "There is no spying on Americans". Towards the end of October 2013, the British Prime Minister David Cameron warned The Guardian not to publish any more leaks, or it will receive a DA-Notice. In November 2013, a criminal investigation of the disclosure was being undertaken by Britain's Metropolitan Police Service. In December 2013, The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said: "We have published I think 26 documents so far out of the 58,000 we've seen."The extent to which the media reports have responsibly informed the public is disputed. In January 2014, Obama said that "the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has shed more heat than light" and critics such as Sean Wilentz have noted that many of the Snowden documents released do not concern domestic surveillance; the US & UK Defense establishment weigh the strategic harm in the period following the disclosures more than their civic public benefit.
In its first assessment of these disclosures, the Pentagon concluded that Snowden committed the biggest "theft" of U. S. secrets in the history of the United States. Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, described Snowden's disclosure as the "most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever". Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows: Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone and location records of whole populations; the disclosure revealed specific details of the NSA's close cooperation with U. S. federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency in addition to the agency's undisclosed financial payments to numerous commercial partners and telecommunications companies, as well as its undisclosed relationships with international partners such as Britain, France Germany, its secret treaties with foreign governments that were established for sharing intercepted data of each other's citizens.
The disclosures were made public over the course of several months since June 2013, by the press in several nations from the trove leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, who obtained the trove while working for Booz Allen Hamilton. George Brandis, the Attorney-General of Australia, asserted that Snowden's disclosure is the "most serious setback for Western intelligence since the Second World War." As of December 2013, global surveillance programs include: The NSA was getting data directly from telecommunications companies codenamed Artifice, Serenade, SteelKnight, X. The real identities of the companies behind these codenames were not included in the Snowden document dump because they were protected as Exceptionally Controlled Information which prevents wide circulation to those who otherwise have the necessary security clearance. Although the exact size of Snowden's disclosure remains unknown, the following estimates have been pu
Fort George G. Meade
Fort George G. Meade is a United States Army installation located in Maryland, that includes the Defense Information School, the Defense Media Activity, the United States Army Field Band, the headquarters of United States Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the Defense Courier Service, Defense Information Systems Agency headquarters and the U. S. Navy's Cryptologic Warfare Group Six, it is named for George G. Meade, a general from the U. S. Civil War, who served as commander of the Army of the Potomac; the fort's smaller census-designated place includes support facilities such as schools and the offices of the Military Intelligence Civilian Excepted Career Program. Called Camp Annapolis Junction, the post was opened as "Camp Admiral" in 1917 on 29.7 sq mi acquired for a training camp. The post was called Camp Meade Cantonment by 1918, Camp Franklin Signal Corps school was located there and in 1919, the Camp Benning tank school—formed from the World War I Camp Colt and Tobyhanna schools—was transferred to the fort before the Tank Corps was disbanded.
Renamed to Fort Leonard Wood, the fort's Experimental Motorized Forces in the summer and fall of 1928 tested vehicles and tactics in expedition convoys. In 1929, the fort's 1st Tank Regiment encamped on the Gettysburg Battlefield. During World War II, Fort Meade was used as a recruit training post and prisoner of war camp, in addition to a holding center for 384 Japanese and Italian immigrant residents of the U. S. arrested as potential fifth columnists. The Second U. S. Army Headquarters transferred to the post on June 15, 1947. From the 1950s until the 1970s, the Fort Meade radar station had various radar equipment and control systems for air defense. Fort Meade had the first Nike Ajax surface-to-air missiles in December 1953 and an accidental firing occurred in 1955 with Battery C, 36th AAA Missile Battalion. In 1962, the Army's Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, 13th Air Defense Artillery Group, transferred from Meade to Homestead AFB for initial deployment of MIM-23 Hawk missiles, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 6th Battalion, 65th Artillery at Fort Meade was deployed to the Miami/Key West area.
Fort Meade bomb disposal experts were dispatched to secure nuclear bombs in the 1964 Savage Mountain B-52 crash. In 1977, a merger organized the fort's U. S. Army Intelligence Agency as part of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command. On 1 October 1991, a wing of the Air Force Intelligence Command transferred to Fort Meade, the organization was replaced by the 70th Operations Group on May 1, 2005. In the early 1990s, 12.7 sq mi was transferred from the post to the Patuxent Research Refuge. A planned closure of the post in the 1990s was not implemented, the Defense Information School moved to the fort in 1995; the 311th Signal Command headquarters was at Fort Meade from 1996 – September 2006. The 70th Intelligence Wing headquarters was established at Fort Meade on July 17, 2000, the Base Realignment and Closure, 2005, designated Fort Meade to gain 5,700 positions. "Fort Meade has more than 54,000 employees, is the largest employer in the state of Maryland and second largest installation by employee population in the Army.
After an August 27, 2007, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency order to assess the contamination at 14 hazardous waste sites on Fort Meade, a September 2007 environmental impact report identified adding two golf courses would be a "significant threat to the biological and territorial integrity of the Patuxent Research Refuge"; the US Army responded. After United States Cyber Command was established at the post in 2009; the consolidation of the Defense Information School and the Defense Visual Information School in fiscal 1996 and further consolidation with the Defense Photography School in fiscal 1998 created a single focal point in the Department of Defense for these specialties fields. Advancements in information technology and recent base realignment and closure initiatives have contributed to the evolution of the school; the result is a single school proud of its historical roots and dedicated to serving the diverse requirements for public affairs and visual information. Alleged gunman Hong Young was arrested in connection with shootings at five public places in Maryland, including an NSA building and occupied vehicles in late February 2015.
No motive has been established but his estranged wife attributed his behavior to mental issues, he told police he heard voices telling him to shoot at a random driver. On March 30, 2015, National Security Agency police officers shot and killed a person who attempted to drive an SUV through a restricted entrance to the NSA campus in Fort Meade, Maryland. A passenger in the SUV was injured, as was an officer, both were treated at a hospital. President Obama was briefed but the FBI determined "we do not believe it is related to terrorism."On February 14, 2018, National Security Agency police officers shot and wounded an individual who rammed an SUV into a barricade near an entry gate outside of the facility. In the immediate aft
