Most Americans are aware of the era of lawlessness in this country that began with the passage of the Eigh-teenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919. The institution of Prohibition brought with it major law enforcement problems, whose effects continue to be felt today. Few people, how-ever, are aware of the major role played by communications intel-ligence in the enforcement of the Prohibition laws. The files of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) and the Federal Communica-tions Commission (FCC), including the files of the Radio Division of the Department of Commerce, show that radio was used on a large scale in connection with rum-running activities. The radio opera-tions of the rum-running organizations were, in fact, comparable in size, technical skill, and organization with the radio operation that would be conducted by enemy agents in World War II.

Listening the the Rumrunners: Radio Intelligence during Prohibition

History

National Security Agency

Military

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Google Chrome is a widely used, free web browser developed by Google based on the open source Chromium project. Chrome has been available for consumers since 2008. Starting in 2010, Google released an enterprise version of Chrome that is configurable through Group Policy and deployable with a Windows Installer (MSI) file. These improvements make Chrome a manageable and deployable browser in Windows domains.

Information Assurance Directorate: Deploying and Securitign Google Chrome in a Windows Enterprise

Reference

The financial impact to the global economy resulting from malicious code is approaching the multi-billion-dollar range. Department of Defense (DoD) systems are not immune to malicious code, and precautions need to be taken to protect the information infrastructures, and ultimately the warfighter. It is in the best interest of the user to preempt the threat posed by malicious code, and thereby enhance the security of the system.

Guidance for Addressing Malicious Code Risk

In order to have any sort of control over your network, you first need to know where everything is. This milestone and the next focus primarily on gathering information about your network (although the points to consider may prompt you to investigate making network changes). Note that, depending on your network, it may be easier to implement Milestones 2 through 5 first for the infrastructure and then for the endpoint devices, instead of trying to do everything at once.

Information Assurance Directorate: NSA Community Gold Standard Technical Guidanc

The Portable Document Formal is pervasive and is used for publishing documents on the web, exchanging files between government entities and government contractors, and for interactive content such as forms and multimedia. Some of the reasons for its popularity include the wide availability of PDF authoring told and freely available readers, cross-platform interoperability, and the ability to maintain the appearance of content across clients with varying hardware and software.

Hidden Data and Metadata in Adobe PDF Files: Publication Risks and Countermeasures Enterprise Applications Division of the Systems and Network Analysis Center (SNAC) Information Assurance Directorate

It is increasingly difficult to detect malicious activity, which makes it extremely important to monitor and collect log data from as many useful sources as possible. This paper provides an introduction to collecting important Windows workstation event logs and storing them in a central location for easier searching and monitoring of network health. The focus of this guidance document is to assist United States Government and Department of Defense administrators in configuring central event log collection and recommend a basic set of events to collect on an enterprise network using Group Policy.

Information Assurance Directorate: Spotting the Adversary with Windows Event Log Monitoring

The Voynich manuscript is famous among enthusiasts of arcana, rare books, and cryptography. It is a 200+ page color rare book written in a cipher that has resisted decryption to this day. It is named after a Polish rare book dealer who surfaced the manuscript in 1912. Its history and provenance are uncertain. Many people have been proposed as possible authors, among them Roger Bacon, John Dee or Edward Kelley, Giovanni Fontana, and Voynich. This 80-page book contains the proceedings of a one-day seminar on the Voynich manuscript, held in Washington, DC on 30 November 1976, notable for the prominence of personnel of the National Security Agency, which was at the time even more deeply shrouded in secrecy than it remains today. The contents include: <ul> <li>General Introduction. Very Filby, Sponsor.</li> <li>Introductory Remarks. M.E. D'Imperio, Moderator.</li> <li>A Linguistic Approach to the Voynich Text. James Child.</li> <li>Some Important New Statistical Findings. Capt. Prescott Currier.</li> <li>Suggestions Toward a Decipherment of the "Key". Dr. Sydney Fairbanks.</li> <li>The Solution Claim of Dr. Robert S. Brumbaugh. M. E. D'Imperio.</li> <li>Further Details of New Statistical Findings. Capt. Prescott Currier.</li> <li>Questions and Discussion.</li> <li>Appendix A. The Voynich Manuscript, Some Notes and Observations. Capt. Prescott Currier.</li> <li>Appendix B. What Constitutes Proof? Stuart H. Buck.</li> </ul> The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires that each federal agency maintain an electronic Reading Room with most frequently requested documents. The FOIA Reading Room series presents selected items from each agency's Reading Room, in this case, the National Security Agency, whose many cryptographers have maintained an interest in the Voynich manuscript for many decades. Readers who enjoy works like THE DA VINCI CODE, PUZZLE PALACE, and SNOWDEN will find this an appealing purchase. Why was the NSA deeply interested in the Voynich manuscript in 1976? What were they thinking? There is no substitute for looking at primary documents and real-time work product to understand how people's minds were actually working in history.

New Research on the Voynich Manuscript: Proceedings of a Seminar (Foia Reading Room)

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Nimble Books

This volume contains four articles written by personnel of the National Security Agency (NSA) about the Voynich manuscript from 1965 to 1978. The first essay, by Brigadier John Tiltman, is entitled "The Voynich Manuscript: The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World" and was presented to the Baltimore Bibliophiles in 1967. It provides a basic summary of facts about the manuscript and its provenance and adds a survey of proposed solutions, most of which it dispenses with quite quickly. I found it interesting to discover that Tiltman was first introduced to the Voynich ms. by William Friedman, founder of the NSA, in 1947 (!) I was also intrigued that Tiltman's scholarly research into the history of medieval herbalism included consultations with leading English academics, no doubt during visits on "Five Eyes" business. The second essay, originally classifed Top Secret Umbra, is "An Application of PTAH to the Voynich Manuscript" by Mary D'Imperio - the title itself was unclassified. A few pages in, I came to a full stop when I encountered this: "PTAH (named for the Egyptian god of wisdom), is a general statistical method developed at IDA (Institute for Defense Analyses), Princeton University. PTAH got its name when a programmer. Mr.Gerry Mitchell, was listening to the opera "Aida" while working on his program. He was struck by the passage "immenso Ptah noi invociam," and named his program after the Egyptian god. The name was ultimately extended from this program, implementing a particular application of the method, to the method and its mathematical theory as well..." The technical meaning of PTAH remains classified, although Google helped me find a journal article that suggests PTAH must be some sort of Hidden Markov Model. (Math. Comput. Appl. 2019, 24, 14; doi:10.3390/mca24010014) D'Imperio used PTAH to analyze the Voynich manuscript and similar works and concluded that "I find the above comparisions quite convincing support for a view that the Voynich text, regarded as a string of single letters, does not 'act like' natural language. Instead, it exhibits a clear positional regularity or characters within words. I believe that these findings strengthen the theory of Friedman and Tiltman that an artificial language may underlie the Yoynich text." Government interest dating back to 1947 ... pharmacology unknown to modern man ... artificial languages ... the movie "ARRIVAL" based on Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" ... hmmm ... The third essay, also by D'Imperio, is "An Application of Cluster Analysis and Multidimensional Scaling to the Question of 'Hands' and 'Languages' in the Voynich Manuscript." She uses cluster analytic techniques to examine findings by Captain Prescott Currier, who suggested that the manuscript's pages can be clustered into groups of multiple authors and styles. D'Imperio's discussion includes warnings that are still sound today: " The interpretation of cluster analysis results is unavoidably circular; we propose a certain structure in the group of objects under study, we perform the computation, and we are happy if we see what we expected, or at least something that makes sense in terms of our original hypothesis, however revised." The fourth and final essay, by James Child, takes an important step forward by proposing that "the Voynich Manuscript does not contain an artificial language nor the enciphered text of an underlying text in an unknown language. but is a text in a hitherto unknown medieval North Germanic dialect." People who enjoy works like THE DA VINCI CODE, PUZZLE PALACE, and Snowden will find this fascinating.

Technical Articles about the Voynich Manuscript (Foia Reading Room)

The National Security Agency and The EC-121 Shootdown

Identifies and presents a thorough account of German intelligence organizations engaged in clandestine work in South America, and a well researched, detailed report of the U.S. response to the perceived threat. This perception was, as Mr. Mowry alludes to in his conclusions, far greater than any actual danger.

Cryptologic Aspects of German Intelligence Activities in South America During World War II

Center for Cryptologic History

Mowry, David P.

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