STATUS REPORT OF WORKING GROUP ON NSA TIPS PILOT OPERATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01139A000100140009-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: January 4, 2017
• Document Release Date: July 13, 2005
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: April 8, 1966
• Content Type: MFR

Approved ForRelease 2005/07/20: CIA-RDP80B01139,A 00100140009-9
SEN
8 April 1966
SUBJECT: Status Report of Working Group on NSA TIPS Pilot Operation
1. This working group has been working steadily since Oetober,
L965, and has had twelve meetings and has produced a second draft
of a report, which is being carefully considered by the members
of the Team. This working group has produced minutes written by
an assistant within NSA to the Chairman. The whole tenor of the
activity has been extremely pragmatic and machine oriented. The
NSA group knows precisely what ought to be done and is trying its
best to get this to be implemented in the inter-agency milieu.
The system to be built has been dubbed COINS (Community On-Line
Intelligence Syst(,m). The original ground rules were that NSA
would arrange to have remote consoles hooked to its computer from
the various participating agencies. NSA quickly scrapped this
proposed arrangement and stated that they would be willing to have
other agencies'-consoles only within the premises on NSA or could
arrange to have other agencies' computers linked to their computer
with the consoles of the respective agencies linked to that agency's
computer. The second alternative was agreed upon after considerable
2. The working group has worked assiduously with the assistance
of many associated working sessions by related groups such as
programmers, communications people, etc. Essentially all of the
types and categories of files have been agreed upon. Data element
standardization problems, file organization, formatting, and
maintenance have been considered, the interrogation language
strategies and formats have been settled, user languages were
agreed to be locally determinable. The translation rates, standard
communication codes, length of messages, etc., have all been
agreed upon as well as the general security problems and the situation
is now one essentially of constructing and writing the programs with
minor additional meetings probably needed, establishing the communica-
tion lengths and commencing the testing of the programs.
3. It has been tentatively agreed that Phase I will commence
in the winter of 1966 and proceed for approximately nine to fifteen
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months. DIA will provide the switch i'ar this system. Phase II w:i 1]_
commence sometime late in 1967 and will involve. more files, more
sophisticated techniques, multiple security level, and other new
features which will be appropriate as learned from the Phase I test.
CIA will. provide the switch for Phase Ti.
11. It should be pointed out that the COINS experiment is
not a true real-time on-Line sys Lem. It is essentially based on
magnetic tape stored files and typical time of access is in minutes,
not seconds. However, it should also be recognized that there is a
generalized curve one could construct plotting vs. access time cost
per inquiry vs. file size and that the present state of the art
in both hardware and software can not provide an economically feasible
Lrue real-time on-l:i_ne inquiry system. Such systems are technically
feasible (witness things like II but are inconceivable within 25X1
the framework of the present intelligence community operational- and
administrative philosophies. This does not mean, however, that
development should not go forward on an appropriate testing of true
on-line real-time system. It should be pointed out that with all
due respect for the need for demonstration tests like COINS, the
capability of this type of retrieval system by the agencies could
have been demonstrated at a much lower cost in one o' several
existing systems with a lower classification within the intelligence
community. Despite whatever success may be achieved by the mounting
of the COINS operation, it Is :imperative that some interagency
groups address itself to the the more monumental problem of the
relative merits of the various types of "on-line system" which
should be tested within the :intelligence community. There should
be a full time interagency group specifically assigned to this area
to study the design, implementation and testing of systems in this 25X1
area.
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