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Citizens Against Unidentified Flying Objects Secrecy v. NSA (Civil Action No. 80-1562)

National Security Agency · 14 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is an affidavit by Eugene F. Yeates, Chief of the National Security Agency's Office of Policy, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia in Citizens Against Unidentified Flying Objects Secrecy v. NSA, Civil Action No. 80-1562, and sworn in September 1980. It traces the plaintiff's FOIA requests for NSA's UFO records and the CIA referrals of NSA documents. Yeates says the COMINT reports stay classified in full, and he describes four non-COMINT records that were released in part or found not responsive.

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seeks. That is, all of the COMINT reports at issue here (with
one exception)· are based on messages which were intercepted from
government net communications systems. (See paragraph 10, above.
Moreover, almost all of these messages were enciphered when
originally transmitted. Thus, release of any portion of the
substantive._message would not only risk identifying the ability
of NSA to intercep.t a particular line of communications but
would also risk revealing the capability of NSA to read a
foreign government's enciphered messages. Similar harm ·would
result from the disclosure of any material that might help to
identify the communications intercepted by· NSA, such as infor-
rnation about date, time, origin or manner of transmission or
receipt. Also, the revelation of the substantive content of
the reports would allow foreign officials to determine which
channels or types of communications are being monitored. The
public disclosure of either the content of the reports or of any
identifying characteristics would have the same adverse conse-
quences on the communications intelligence activities of the
United States. All such information relates to classified
communications intelligence functions of NSA that have not been
publicly disclosed by the Agency in any other conte~t.
RELEASE OF NON-COMINT RECORDS
20. Three of the four non-COMINT records at issue here
were released in large part, with certain deletions. On~ of
these records was withheld in its entirety. These documents are:
a. A document entitled UFO Hypothesis and Survival
Questions which )'as prepared by an Agency employee. The
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entire report has been released except for the name and or-
ganization of the preparer of the document. This is not a
COMINT report and contains no reference to SIGINT activities.
It is a draft of a monograph that was located in an Agency
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Document, from the nsa collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 14 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.