Shh!

All the talk lately about spying and the NSA, and then today we got this story from the Chronicle about governments upset at Google for showing satellite photos of secret sites.

Like what? Well, here's an article about the secret Echelon program. Among its revelations:

The largest overseas station in the Project P415 network is the US satellite and communications base at Menwith Hill near Harrogate in Yorkshire. It is run undercover by the NSA and taps into all Britain's main national and international communications networks.

It took less than five minutes to find a satellite shot of this NSA monitoring station "at Menwith Hill near Harrogate in Yorkshire."

But there's no need to rely on that blurry bit of data; the place ain't exactly a secret:
Menwith Hill Station -- many good photos
Menwith Hill, "the Original Big Brother"
Menwith Hill on Wikipedia

This put me in the mood to listen to The Conet Project, an exhaustive 4-CD set of numbers stations -- shortwave spy broadcasts. NPR's "Lost and Found Sound" series did an episode on the numbers stations in, it looks like, 2000.