Remembering Challenger

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There's a framed patch on the wall in my monitoring post that I treasure. It was given to me a few years ago by a friend who worked at NASA - just one of the network of space and aviation contacts I had made over the years.

I rarely glance at it and sometimes forget it's there - until the sad anniversaries come along and reminds me exactly where I was and what I was doing at the moment of the Apollo One fire, Challenger explosion and (of course) the loss of Columbia along with Amarillo's astronaut Rick Husband and Lubbock's Willie McCool.

Today is one of those days - and as always I think about where I was when Challenger exploded killing all onboard.

Back in 1986 I was working at the Amarillo Globe News as a photographer, and even way back then I was deep into radio monitoring.

We had personal darkrooms back then and in mine (no surprise here) I had a scanner for listening to the local police and such.

One day I made a discovery (quite by accident and as it would turn out fortuitously) that hidden in the false ceiling of my darkroom was a coiled up run of antenna coax that led to the abandoned radio transmitter tower on top of the AGN.

Back in the day - the antenna (which I think is still there) was used as a AM radio transmission cable for KGNC AM - which (if you didn't know) used to be owned by the Amarillo Globe News - in fact the call letters GNC (in KGNC) stood for the Globe News Company.

Having discovered the cable (and being the radiohead I am) I decided to tap into it and see if it still worked.

One night I smuggled in my huge Panasonic RF-4900 shortwave receiver (a multi-band monster) into my darkroom when the newsroom was rather empty.

RF 4900 

I hooked it up to the coax and was surprised to see it not only worked but worked amazingly well. That established, I kept the radio in my locking closet normally used as a photographic paper safe that only I had the key too.

For some reason, I didn't want the editors to know that in my downtime I was back in my darkroom with headphones on scanning the shortwave bands, listening to ship-to-shore telephone calls, international aeronautical transmissions and military HF stations.

January, 28, 1986 was a slow news day - and I knew a space shuttle launch was scheduled so I turned on the red safelight - locked my darkroom door, hooked up the shortwave and donned a pair of Koss headphones.

I tuned to 10.780 MHz USB also known as "CAPE RADIO" a shortwave link used to communicate with SRB (rocket booster) recovery ships off the coast of Florida.

The atmospherics were just right and the communications came in loud and booming as if they were local. NASA rebroadcast the UHF shuttle communications and countdown on that channel so recovery teams could listen in.

And then there was this long silence - and garbled communications and the words "We've obviously had a major malfunction" which (at the time) I hadn't realized what that truly meant. I knew something went wrong but there was nobody saying "Challenger had blown up."

Then after what seemed an eternity of silence, the recovery ships began talking to each other - panicked warnings went out that debris was falling from the skies and the ships and helicopters in the recovery area needed to evacuate the area as soon as possible.

And then that's when it hit me what had happened. A sinking feeling went through my entire body.

I flew out my darkroom and into the newsroom and shouted, "the Space Shuttle has just blown up."

Everyone looked at me strange as if I had finally inhaled too many darkroom fumes or I was joking. One reporter even laughed.

I then went over to the TV in the newsroom and turned it on. I flipped through the channels and there were no bulletins - no special reports just game shows and commercials.

And then it happened: "We interrupt this program for a Special Bulletin."

I also remember at that same moment the urgent bulletin bell began ringing wildly on the AP teletype machine.

A video replay of Challenger coming apart filled the screen.

And then the newsroom went crazy.

Later on, I had to to explain how I knew before anyone else and I had to reveal the secret of what I was really doing in my darkroom.

After that the radio became a permanent (open) fixture and a part of my job - Steve Douglass - photographer/radio monitor.

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Terrorist Hunt: Suicide bombers threatening Olympics

SOCHI, Russia — Russian security officials are hunting down three potential female suicide bombers, one of whom is believed to be in Sochi, where the Winter Olympics will begin next month.

Police leaflets seen by an Associated Press reporter at a central Sochi hotel on Tuesday contain warnings about three potential suicide bombers. A police letter said that one of them, Ruzanna Ibragimova, a 22-year-old widow of an Islamic militant, was at large in Sochi.


A U.S. congressman who was in Sochi on Tuesday to assess the situation said he was impressed by the work of Russian security forces but troubled that potential suicide bombers had gotten into the city, despite all of the extraordinary security measures.

“We know some of them got through the perimeter,” Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, told The Associated Press. “She’s for real. What we don’t know is how many more black widows are out there.”

Russian authorities have blamed the so-called “black widows” of slain insurgents for previous suicide attacks in the country.

The Black Sea resort town will host the games amid concerns about security and potential terrorist attacks.

POTUS NSA reforms will change little.

RT: We were all looking at the president’s speech the wrong way.

It was billed as a major speech on reform to the nation’s intelligence programs. But although some genuine reforms were introduced, the speech really wasn’t about reform. It was about saving the NSA’s most controversial tactic, as revealed by Edward Snowden, which is to “collect it all.” Build the haystack, and then find the needle.

Of all the Snowden disclosures thus far, it’s the very first one that’s still most significant: the NSA is running a domestic spying program based on the collection and storage of virtually all Americans' telephone metadata.

The White House and spy chiefs deny it is a domestic spy program – a denial the President reiterated in his ‘reform’ speech. But their denials are belied by former CIA Director Michael Morrell, a member of the president’s own NSA review panel, who admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee a few days before the speech, "There is quite a bit of content in metadata. When you have the records of the phone calls that a particular individual made, you can learn an awful lot about that person."

But here’s the thing about that program: it has an expiration date – something the White House was keenly aware of heading into the ‘reform’ speech.


Just as the telephone spying program is the most jaw-dropping NSA disclosure; it’s also the program most in peril. Already one federal court has ruled it likely unconstitutional. Back in July, the House of Representatives came within a handful of votes of killing the program – and that was before an entire autumn and now winter of more disclosures.

A prominent coalition of powerful Senators on both sides of the aisle is pushing to end the program, too. So there are a lot of pitchforks pointed at it.

Then there’s June 1, 2015, when Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which underpins the NSA’s telephone spying program, expires. Congress may not have the votes today to kill the telephone spying program. But, thanks to Edward Snowden, Congress almost certainly doesn’t have the votes next year to renew it either.

So that’s what President Obama, a fierce defender of the telephone spying program and Commander in Chief of the nation’s intelligence operations, was facing when he stepped to the podium in the Department of Justice’s Great Hall. And it’s why his ‘reform’ speech that followed was actually a Trojan horse containing a last-ditch effort to save the NSA’s “collect it all” telephone spying program.

Yes, the president said he is, “ordering a transition that will end the Section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists.” But he didn’t do that. Instead he took the primary concern of NSA critics, which is the collection and storage of Americans telephone data, and severed it in two, by focusing strictly on the storage of that data – not the collection of it.

He pushed for a tinkering of the program that would retain the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone (meta)data, but, “without the government holding this bulk metadata.” Instead, private telecoms or some sort of “third party” would retain the databases. It’s up to the attorney general, the intelligence community, and Congress ultimately to figure out how to make it work, which could be difficult since the telecoms don’t want this responsibility and it’s hard to imagine a trustworthy “third party” capable of retaining these databases, short of the ACLU or Electronic Frontier Foundation.

However, the important thing to remember is, no matter who’s holding the databases, those databases are still being filled with nearly every single American’s phone data. The government may have to deal with more restricted access to these databases in the short-term, and lose ownership of them altogether in the long-term, but indiscriminate bulk collection will continue indefinitely.

This convenient distinction wasn’t lost on those who know the NSA best and have blown the whistle on it. Speaking at the National Press Club within an hour of the President’s ‘reform’ speech, NSA whistleblower Kirk Wiebe called it a “ruse,” adding, “It’s not where the data is. It’s a red-herring to say if the NSA doesn’t have it, it’s safe. Not true.”

Another NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney, criticized the speech saying that any approach that “still maintains bulk collection is the wrong way to do it.” Yet that’s exactly the approach President Obama took – with good reason.

READ THE STORY AT RT

SAVANNAH, GA. – A military spokesman says one member of an elite Army helicopter unit is dead and two crew members suffered injuries when their aircraft slammed into the ground while trying to land at a Savannah, Ga., airfield.

Maj. Allen Hill said Thursday that the MH-60 Black Hawk was returning from a routine training flight to Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah when it made a "hard landing" late Wednesday on or near the airstrip. The names of the dead and injured soldiers were not immediately released.

The crew belongs to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which trains to fly helicopters behind enemy lines under cover of darkness. Also called the Night Stalkers, the unit has a battalion based in Savannah.

On Jan. 8, a Navy helicopter crashed about 18 miles off Virginia Beach, killing three aboard.