ABSTRACT
You may not know what it is or what it does, but measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) has been around for decades; you just probably never recognised it as such. Here are a few examples demonstrating the importance of MASINT during the Cold War era:
For the past 40 years, American intelligence officials have struggled with the nagging question of just what MASINT is. There are plenty of unclassified definitions around, both official and unofficial, but no one can seem to agree on just one. For example, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which has always been responsible for managing the US intelligence community’s MASINT collection and analytic programs, has defined MASINT as intelligence ‘derived from specific sensors for the purpose of identifying any distinctive features associated with the source, emitter, or sender, and to facilitate subsequent identification of the same’ (DIA 2 1979: 26).
