Eyeballing the National Security Agency San Antonio TX

Donate $25 for two DVDs of the Cryptome collection of files from 1996 to the present

26 July 2009. Aerial photos from March 2009:

http://cryptome.org/nsa-sa-0309/nsa-sa-0309.htm

7 December 2008. Add more recent plan. See also news report on construction and photo:

http://www.sacurrent.com/news/story.asp?id=69607

20 May 2007

A writes:

With regard to http://cryptome.org/nsa-sa-eyeball.htm, the NSA training center on Wurzbach Rd., San Antonio, TX, is now seen to be named the Southwest Learning Center. Courses in Spanish and Portuguese from the Defense Language Institute are among the offerings. (http://www.usarso.army.mil/newsletter/Feb_Mar%2008%20Newsletter.pdf)

Aerial at maps.live.com

27 April 2007. Add April 18, 2007, news report and birdseye of site of NSA training facility.

http://www.nsa.gov/releases/data_center.cfm

NSA PRESS RELEASE
19 April 2007
For further information, contact:
NSA Public and Media Affairs, 301-688-6524

NSA Announces Plans for Data Center in San Antonio

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) has identified a facility in San Antonio, Tex., as the site of a data center. Determination for the site was made after a comprehensive evaluation of potential locations nationwide, using input from government organizations, such as the Army Corps of Engineers, and commercial data center plans.

NSA has also engaged other government agencies to pursue the suggestion that Intelligence Community organizations collaborate to determine the potential for shared data center sites.

For more information about the NSA/CSS and its national security mission, visit the website, www.nsa.gov.

19 April 2005

http://www.nsa.gov/careers/students_6.cfm

[One of thirty listings.]
Career Fair
NSA Career Expo
San Antonio, TX
May, 4 2005
Please bring a resume and unofficial transcript.
Mariott San Antonio NW, Sam Houston Ballroom 11 am - 6 pm

16 April 2005. One of the Eyeball series.

See nearby NSA Medina Regional SIGINT Operations Center:

http://eyeball-series.org/mrsoc-eyeball.htm

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/howard/bal-md.ho.ar.nsa16apr16,1,2696420.story?coll=bal-local-howard&ctrack=1&cset=true

National Security Agency leases Texas plant for expansion project
Plan calls for adding 6,000 employees by 2008
By William Wan and Melissa Harris
Sun Staff
Originally published April 16, 2005
Making room for a wave of new hires, the National Security Agency has leased a former Sony computer chip plant in San Antonio from a Maryland real estate company, the agency said yesterday. Some Maryland employees will be affected by the expansion in Texas, the NSA said, because a core group of experienced analysts at the agency's Fort Meade headquarters will be transferred to train the new ones in San Antonio. Employees will not be moved over their objections or laid off as a result, officials says.
Like the CIA, FBI and the nation's other intelligence agencies, the NSA -- one of Maryland's largest employers -- has been developing plans to grow and transform since the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent national focus on global terrorism. Helped in part by recent funding increases from Congress, the expansion in San Antonio is part of the agency's four-year plan to add 6,000 new employees, many of them language and intelligence analysts, the NSA said. The agency's expansion plans calls for adding 1,500 employees every year starting from last year until 2008. The agency, which employs more than 30,000 people worldwide, said it is planning a career fair in San Antonio on May 4.
For Corporate Office Properties Trust -- the Maryland real estate investment company that bought the former Sony building and is adapting it to the agency -- the deal with NSA in San Antonio marks the beginning of its own plans for expansion. "It's quite an accomplishment," said the company's president and CEO, Randall Griffin. "It's the beginning of our multi-city, multilocational expansion strategy." The Columbia-based company has long provided office space for the U.S. government. Its holdings include a site next to Fort Meade called the National Business Park, which is packed with NSA contractors. "We have become increasingly reliant on intelligence and defense tenants, particularly due to the increased activity in those sectors following the events of September 11, 2001," the company noted in its annual disclosure to securities regulators.
Officially, the real estate investment company leased the San Antonio site to the Army Corps of Engineers, which handles such real estate deals for the U.S. government's intelligence community. Corporate Office Properties Trust has 30 other leases with the corps. The company bought the San Antonio site for $30.5 million two weeks ago. The former Sony plant consists of two connected buildings with office and research and development space totaling 470,000 square feet.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/stories/MYSA041505.1A.nsa_jobs.1db5ca48c.html

Spy agency jobs to flow into S.A.
Web Posted: 04/15/2005 12:00 AM CDT
L.A. Lorek
Express-News Business Writer
[Excerpts]
The National Security Agency, the nation's cryptology branch, has leased the former Sony chip plant in Northwestern Bexar County and plans to hire at least 1,500 employees, NSA officials said Thursday. Even more jobs could be added as the site develops in several phases, according to the NSA. Nationwide, the NSA is hiring up to 4,500 employees through 2008 and some of those employees will be located here, according to an e-mail message from Ellen Cioccio, an NSA spokeswoman. The NSA already has about 2,000 people at Lackland AFB's Medina Annex. In addition, a group of experienced analysts will transfer from NSA's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters to San Antonio. They will be here to train the military and new civilian employees, Cioccio said.
The San Antonio NSA office includes personnel from the Army, Marine Corps., Navy, Air Force and the civilian Defense Department. "NSA is expanding its presence in San Antonio as part of our transformation efforts and as a result of the lessons learned from our global war on terrorism experiences," according to Cioccio. San Antonio beat out sites in Georgia and Hawaii for the NSA expansion project. San Antonio was chosen because the NSA already has a large, growing presence here.
The new NSA site, at Loop 410 and Military Drive, consists of two connected buildings that contain office and research and development space totaling about 475,000 square feet. Those buildings could be expanded by several thousand more square feet. In addition, Office Properties Trust plans to buy 43 more acres around the 50-acre Sony Campus. The campus has the ability to accommodate three more buildings and its developers eventually expect the site to exceed 1 million square feet, making it the city's second largest office park after USAA's headquarters on the North Side. The developers need to do some remodeling to the site to accommodate the NSA operations, which are expected to begin moving in this fall.
Already, San Antonio has a strong presence of cyber security operations and research with existing NSA operations and the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Agency at Lackland, nicknamed Security Hill. The University of Texas at San Antonio also is one of 59 universities in the nation recognized by the NSA, which designated it a center for academic excellence in information assurance education. With its growing expertise, San Antonio has developed a reputation nationwide as a top-notch information security city, said U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez. And since 9-11 and Gulf War II, the U.S. government has been beefing up its intelligence agencies and particularly its operations here, he said.
The Texas Congressional delegation received a briefing on the NSA expansion in San Antonio on Thursday. The project has been kept top secret because of its mission. "It's a sophisticated operation in every way," Gonzalez said. "This is a great opportunity for individuals in San Antonio." The site will be a major intelligence campus of the NSA and one of the largest campuses outside of Fort Meade, where the NSA has between 20,000 and 30,000 employees and operates like a small city. The NSA must expand outside of Washington because they've run out of room at their current site, Bamford said. The San Antonio site will also help diversify the agency and not make them as vulnerable in the event of an attack, he said. On May 4, the NSA will have a career fair at the Omni Hotel in San Antonio. The agency is looking to hire intelligence analysts, language experts, computer scientists, mathematicians, signals analysts, accountants, financial analysts, investigators and police officers.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/stories/2005/03/28/daily30.html

Sony Electronics campus sold for $30.5 million
Corporate Office Properties Trust has purchased Sony Electronics Inc.'s 470,000-square-foot office complex in Northwest San Antonio.
Columbia, Md.-based Corporate Office Properties Trust (NYSE: OFC) bought the complex for $30.5 million. The real estate firm also placed 27 acres of adjoining land under contract. The firm plans to develop additional office buildings for tenants as demand dictates. The Sony complex -- which includes two buildings previously used as office and research and development space -- is located at Loop 410 and Military Drive. Sony Electronics formerly occupied the space to produce silicon wafers, a basic component for manufacturing microchips. However, Sony ceased operations at the plant in 2003 and put the complex up for sale. Sony Electronics, located in San Diego, is a unit of Sony Corp. of America, the U.S. subsidiary of the Japanese electronics giant.
Rand Griffin, president and chief operating officer of Corporate Office Properties Trust, says the office complex will be leased to one of company's top 20 tenants. Griffin declined to reveal the identity of the company that is leasing the property. The real estate trust leases space in its facilities primarily to government and corporate clients in the intelligence and defense sectors, Griffin adds. It is one of the leading owners of office properties in the Washington, D.C., area.
Some of the trust's largest real estate tenants include the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; the National Security Agency; McLean, Va.-based Booz Allen Hamilton; Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp. (NYSE: NOC); and El Segundo, Calif.-based Computer Sciences Corp. (NYSE: CSC). Corporate Office Properties Trust is a real estate investment trust that owns, manages, leases, acquires and develops suburban office properties. The company owns 147 office properties totaling 12.5 million square feet of leasable space.
© 2005 American City Business Journals Inc.

Eyeballing
the
National Security Agency
San Antonio, TX

http://www.mapquest.com

This plan downloaded 7 December 2008. The 3D views have not changed from those shown below.
http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=29.448002~-98.640436&style=h&lvl=17&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&encType=1
[Image]
[Image]

http://www.maps.google.com

Sony Foundry from the Wayback Machine

27 April 2007

A sends:

I go past the reported [NSA] training facility at Wurzbach and I-10 (29.5344 N , 98.5609 W) several times a week and have been watching for signs of activity. After the remodeling in FY 2006, FY 2007 started out slowly -- there were virtually no cars in the parking lot until after New Year's Day 2007, but things have been picking up and I estimate there are now a hundred or so cars there on business days. Not a full house, but obviously stuff is being done there. Curiously, for a city and state where trucks and SUVs are abundant, the cars in the parking lot are mostly sedans with Texas plates.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/stories/MYSA041907.1E.NSA.2cdddf8.html

NSA to build data center at S.A. campus

Web Posted: 04/18/2007 10:47 PM CDT

L.A. Lorek

Express-News Business Writer

The National Security Agency plans to put a data center at the site of the old Sony microchip plant on the Northwest Side, a sign the funding delay for the agency's expansion there may be over.

U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez announced the plans for the data center in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon.

"This facility will diversify San Antonio's already robust economy, and the resulting job growth signals continuing economic prosperity in San Antonio," said Gonzalez, D-San Antonio.

The NSA could not be reached for comment.

"This is a real positive sign for the mission of NSA in San Antonio," said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who has worked to get the project here. "We are still hoping and continue to work with them to get additional personnel from the NSA to San Antonio at the site they are working on."

The agency, known as the nation's code maker and code breaker, already has 2,200 Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and civilian Defense Department employees locally at Lackland AFB's Medina Annex. Those employees are expected to move into the new NSA campus at the Sony plant site next year, said Mario Hernandez, president of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation.

The number of NSA employees at the Texas Cryptology Center is expected to double to more than 4,000 in coming years, Hernandez said.

"We expect there to be a large presence in the way of jobs in the new Texas Cryptology Center, and we expect there to be a very large data center presence," he said.

Two years ago, the NSA announced plans to put a satellite campus in San Antonio. Within weeks, the agency held a job fair in conjunction with its local expansion.

Since last year, San Antonio business and political leaders have worked with the NSA to find out about its plans for its satellite campus. Funding for the project was reportedly in limbo.

Now it appears the top-secret government agency will move forward with plans on the 50-acre site at Loop 410 and Military Drive, which Corporate Office Properties Trust bought and leases to the government.

Three months ago, Wolff and other San Antonio officials visited with NSA officials at the agency's headquarters.

"We told them we were going to get Microsoft, and that really opened up their eyes," Wolff said. "I had a feeling that was a good step for us."

In January, Microsoft Corp. announced plans to build a 470,000-square-foot, $550 million data center on 44 acres in Westover Hills. That announcement followed on the heels of another by Lowe's Corp. last year for plans to build a 100,000-square-foot data center in the same area.

Data centers, which house thousands of computer servers, often have a clustering effect, Hernandez said. San Antonio is expected to get two to four new centers this year, and this was one of the projects he has been working on, he said.

The facilities don't require a large number of employees, but construction costs for the specialized structures are high.

The NSA also is remodeling an old Albertsons grocery store near Interstate 10 on Wurzbach Road [below], which it plans to use for a training facility.

"This is great news for San Antonio," said Robert Peche, the city's economic development department director. "We understand they were looking at several sites around the country for a data storage facility. The fact they chose to come here is good news. We hope there is more to come."

__________

Eyeballing the National Security Agency San Antonio, TX

Eyeballing
the
National Security Agency
San Antonio, TX