In 2008 I attended a fascinating program live at the , where I'm a member. Just today I discovered that they had posted a of the 1 hour talk. told a fascinating tale of how Silicon Valley resources were created and co-opted in the service of the Cold War. I thought some folks here might be interested.

One of the men my age at my old church in Sunnyvale (St. Herman of Alaska Orthodox Church) worked at the Sunnyvale Lockheed-Martin plant. NASA Ames was next door, and the NSA reportedly has or had its main west coast listening facility there. I used to drive past the place on the way to work.

The part of the talk I remember as being coolest was that the CIA, I think, built , letting Stanford use it for whatever they wanted as long as the CIA could commandeer it for the one or two days a month when everything was aligned so that they could use it to pick up Soviet radio traffic reflected off the moon.

That's well known on campus at Stanford, one of the earliest tales I was told.