Word: eavesdrops
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have been granted temporary visas, including an estimated 1,200 students. The Government also maintains huge computer databases with information on individuals suspected of having radical, anti-U.S. associations. Meanwhile, the supersecret National Security Agency uses the world's most technologically advanced surveillance techniques to eavesdrop on questionable telephone calls and radio communications abroad and intercept and decode suspicious telex messages. To conform to U.S. privacy laws, the intercepts take place outside U.S. borders. But as the rest of the world painfully knows, determined terrorists are very hard to stop...
...installed missile sites in Libya, lobbying for resumed military aid to the contras in Nicaragua, and now supplying missiles to anti-Marxist guerrillas in Angola and rebels battling the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Then there have been symbolic actions that infuriated Moscow: a naval mission skirted U.S.S.R. waters to eavesdrop on Soviet communications on the Black Sea coast, and the U.S. ordered 38% of the Soviet diplomats at the United Nations (many of them spies, in the Administration's view) to be sent home in the next two years...
...that climate, Washington seized an unexpected chance to embarrass the Soviets by publicizing the spy-dust episode. As a propaganda opportunity, it ranked with the 1976 disclosure that the Soviets were bombarding the embassy with potentially harmful microwaves, apparently in an effort to eavesdrop on communications. U.S. officials gave this account: as early as 1976, microscopic pinches of NPPD were found at the embassy. The chemical is a synthetic one concocted in Soviet laboratories and almost unmentioned in scientific literature. It has no known use except for espionage. It is odorless and, in the tiny quantities normally used, invisible...
Other technological breakthroughs have made secrets harder to keep. Most phone messages now pass through the airwaves rather than over wires, which facilitates interception by the microwave gadgetry atop Soviet consulates and in offices. Sophisticated laser devices can eavesdrop on conversation in a room by picking up the vibrations from the windowpane. The most insecure place to store information is probably a computer. A study by the Department of Defense Computer Security Center in Fort Meade, Md., concluded that only 30 out of about 17,000 DOD computers are even minimally secure against intrusion by clever hackers. Though...
...military intelligence satellite called a SIGINT (for "signals intelligence"), which is able to intercept electronic messages. The 6,000- lb. bird was to be spring-ejected from the shuttle, then rocket-propelled into a geostationary orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. The satellite will allow the U.S. to eavesdrop on traffic between Moscow and Soviet missile command centers. Using radar and infrared, the SIGINT will also be able to "see" Soviet launches. Said a U.S. military official: "Our country needs to have a better assessment of our response capabilities where the Soviets are concerned, whether it is One-fifth...