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DNI Avian Influenza Daily Digest

by Claudinne

This digest is produced by the United States Government, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Washington DC, USA. Articles and resource documents in this digest are from open sources and unclassified.

This digest contains raw open source content and is not an evaluated intelligence product. Readers are encouraged to contribute updates and/or clarifications that will be posted in subsequent issues of the digest. Articles may contain copyrighted material, further dissemination outside government channels may be prohibited without permission from the copyright owners.

Unsubscribe/Subscribe to the AI Digest 12/10/08 South China Morning Post, contributed by email--Our city's elaborate defences against bird flu have, once again, been breached. This time, dead chickens at a farm in Yuen Long have been confirmed to be infected by the H5 virus....

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part IX: Entrepreneurship in ...

by steveblank

This post is the latest in the “ Secret History Series .”  They’ll make much more sense if you read some of the earlier ones for context. See the Secret History bibliography for sources and supplemental reading.

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In the 1950′s Stanford University’s Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) continued to develop innovative microwave tubes for the U.S. military. This next product, the Traveling Wave Tube, would have a major impact on electronic intelligence. Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, Fred Terman, encouraged scientists and engineers to set up companies to build these microwave tubes for the military. Funded by military contracts, these 1950′s microwave tube startups would help build Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture and environment.

Why Electronics Intelligence? a penetrating bomber would face? Were there holes in their radar coverage our bombers could sneak through? What was the best altitude to avoid the Soviet defenses? ELINT operators on each flight were tasked to gather basic data about the characteristics of the radar: is this a new type of radar or an existing one? What is its frequency, power, pulse repetition interval, rotation rate, scan rate, polarization, carrier modulation characteristics, etc. Then they would use direction finding equipment on their aircraft to locate its position. Early ELINT receivers were not much different then the radios you had at home – someone had to manually turn a dial to tune them to the correct frequency. By the 1950’s these receivers could automatically “sweep” a frequency band, but this action was mechanical and slow. That was fine if the Soviet radar was operating continuously, but if it was just a brief radar transmission or burst communication (which Soviet submarines used), we would probably miss hearing it. (The Soviets kept their radars turned off to stop us from recording their signals. So at times multiple ELINT planes would fly on a mission – one to run at the Soviet border appearing to attack, the other to pick up the signals from the air defense network as it responded to the intrusion. Keep in mind that 32 of these planes were shot down in the Cold War.)

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