February 1, 2026
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U.S. quietly declassifies Chilly–Struggle period ‘JUMPSEAT’ surveillance satellites
The Nationwide Reconnaissance Workplace has now declassified a satellite tv for pc program used to spy on America’s adversaries
Nationwide Reconnaissance Workplace
Some forty years in the past, the U.S. launched a sequence of secret satellites, designed to spy on the nation’s adversaries.
Launched between March 1971 and February 1987, these satellite tv for pc missions, nicknamed “JUMPSEAT,” have been declassified by the Nationwide Reconnaissance Workplace (NRO).
The NRO and the U.S. Airforce developed the satellites collectively to spice up the U.S. authorities’s “area intelligence portfolio,” with a view to monitoring “adversarial offensive and defensive weapon system improvement,” based on the NRO. It’s unclear what, precisely, the JUMPSEAT satellites have been monitoring.
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“The historic significance of JUMPSEAT can’t be understated,” mentioned James Outzen, NRO director of the Heart for the Research of Nationwide Reconnaissance, in the identical assertion. “Its orbit offered the U.S. a brand new vantage level for the gathering of distinctive and significant alerts intelligence from area.”
Nationwide Reconnaissance Workplace
The primary JUMPSEAT mission launched in 1971 from a navy base close to Santa Barbara, California, and offered data to the U.S. Division of Protection and the Nationwide Safety Company, amongst different nationwide safety our bodies.
Based on a December memo signed by the NRO director Christopher Scolese, the JUMPSEAT satellites carried out “admirably,” however have been decommissioned in 2006. Declassifying the missions, he mentioned, would pose little threat to “present and future satellite tv for pc methods.”
Extra detailed details about what the satellites did could also be coming in future. “After restricted declassification,” Scolese wrote within the memo, “we’ll consider this system for a extra full programmatic declassification as time and sources allow.”
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