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What Life Was Like Inside the Hexagon Project
As new submitter kulnor writes, "Hexagon, a cold war secret project around spy satellites to monitor USSR was declassified last September." kulnor excerpts from the AP story as carried by Yahoo, outlining how more than 1,000 people in and around Danbury, CT kept mum about the nature of their employment: "'For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets. They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized 'cleanroom' where the equipment was stored. They spoke in code.' As more and more WWII and cold war secrets are declassified, we learn about amazing technological feats involving hundreds of people working in secrecy. I wonder what will emerge in a few decades around modern IT, the Internet, hacks, and the like." Every time I visit Oak Ridge, TN, I am amazed by the same phenomenon of successful large-scale secrecy.
So much for the usual anti-conspiracy claim of "more than a few dozen" people not being able to keep a secret. 1000 people can keep a secret for decades as long as they have a sufficient incentive.
The SR-71s were certainly noticed by the Soviet's as they were passing through their airspace, and while successful, certainly, they could also have been used to hide the existence of the various spy satellite programs by providing a plausible alternative means by which the US could have gained the information they used at various treaty negotiations. Eisenhower's Corona program began in 1960, years before the blackbird began overflights of the Soviet Union, and was clearly both a gigantic success and a gigantic secret. Setting up a secondary secret program which had telltale signs the Soviet's could pick up on to mask the existence of the primary one seems like a great way to keep the satellite programs a secret both externally and within the US government, where they could also be attributed to the other program when discussing the results with individuals who needed the information but did not need to know about the program itself.
Yes, current shit is heavily redacted. This has always been the case. For that matter it was even heavier in the past and prior to 1966 (when the FOIA was passed) there was basically no mechanism to even ask. During WWII you just didn't find out about government secrets, at all.
Part of declassification is just age. Most things stay classified for 25-72 years (how long depends on what you are talking about). So until that time has passed, they aren't declassified. Parts might be made available under FOIA or other special circumstances, but they aren't full declassified.
The reason is that information is only sensitive for so long. So by building in an automatic time, you reduce the risk anything still sensitive is revealed.
After that time, the documents get reviewed to see if they should be released. The government has released a lot of shit too, some of it not at all flattering to them.
So for stuff now, 25 years is the earliest you'll see it. Some things last longer (50 years is the House of Representatives standard). The longest I know of is census data, that is 72 years.
Declassification isn't automatic after that time, of course, but they do seem to take it seriously. There are lots and lots and lots of declassified documents out there. So please don't bitch that they won't show you classified stuff now. That has never been the case. If you think that should be changed fair enough but don't try to act like it is a new thing.
Although the SR-71 was made to operate beyond the reach of fighter aircraft ans surface-to-air missiles, there was still the potential that it could be brought down, or malfunction and crash, over enemy territory. This carries a lot of risks.
In addition, the article mentions that a full-frame image from a KH-9 could cover an area over 300 miles across. That kind of wide-field view if important militarily in a way that complements the closer-up images from spy aircraft.
The SR-71 has a somewhat smaller radar cross-section than you'd expect for such a large aircraft, but it was hardly stealthy: the USSR and China could know exactly when they were overflown by it. They could also know pretty well when a spy satellite would be overhead of a certain area, but couldn't always be sure if it was taking photos during each pass. This meant that they always has to assume that their military sites were under continuous surveillance, even if they weren't, and expend significant resources to counteract that. Same, too, on our side.
Although the SR-71 could get most anywhere on the globe within a day, so long as the orbit inclination is right (they were mostly polar orbits, I would guess) you are pretty much guaranteed to have a satellite pass within 12-24 hours anyway. And once it is launched, the bird is always up there: you don't have to worry much about staging it the way you do with a limited number of aircraft. There may have been places too deep inside the USSR and China for the SR-71 or U-2 to reach.
So, in short, one could conclude that the military wanted a variety of intelligence gathering options for breadth, depth, redundancy, and theatrics. The fact that there was a lot of money available for such things, which could be spread across a lot of agencies and a congressional districts, probably didn't hurt, either. They didn't have to choose among options: they could opt to do them all.
I am overjoyed there is no more sense of shared purpose. Otherwise, I might have been drafted to go to Iraq or Afghanistan or attack the Libyans from afar. This idea that countries must have a purpose or a goal is ridiculous. You'll end up with a state like China, where talking heads decide what the next goal is and then the people blindly follow. And in following that goal, the path is only the vision of the talking heads. When the US was founded, the philosophers who wrote the Constitution didn't talk about how the US was going to be first in education or dominate another country in GDP. The philosophers spoke about a country where each man would be able to follow his passions with in the law. The 13 colonies fought the war of independence for mutual benefit. It's hard to see the benefit in beating other countries in subjective goals.
Oh shit, now I'm rambling, but I hope you get the point.