Conducting Network Penetration and Espionage in a Global Environment

Preface

The past 40 years have seen a phenomenal growth in the area of data communications, to say the least. During the Vietnam War, one of my duty stations was on an island in the China Sea. I was part of a signal intelligence group, intercepting and decoding wartime communications traffic. We did our best to decode and analyze the information we intercepted, but there were many times when we required the help of a high-end (at that time) mainframe computer system. Did we have a communications network in place to just upload the data to the mainframe, let it do the processing, and then download it back to us? Not a chance! We had to take the large magnetic tapes, give them to the pilots on the SR-71 Blackbird, and fly them to the United States ...