The last few TREX labs videos have been about radio equipet and gathering intelligence by looking at different signals with software-defined radios, both that you can buy and also a few that we designed speculatively, things that may be potentially available to you in the future.

But today we're going to talk about signals intelligence as a wider

discipline. Welcome back to T-Rex Talk. Today we're going to talk to a friend of mine, someone that I've

known for a while who happens to have a background in signals intelligence, but you probably

know him as the guy who runs the Wausen Watch Company. Paul Brown, welcome to the show.

I'm sure we'll talk about watches at some point, but let's start off talking a little bit about

signals intelligence, and maybe the best way to get into this is your background what you used to do in you know ways that don't get you in trouble by uh revealing

details yeah well first thanks for having me on the show isaac it's a real pleasure to be here

um certainly love the opportunity and love what you guys do. Just all the interesting topics you get

into are certainly fun to watch. And I love the topic of SIGAN with my background, but I'd love to talk

about that. Yeah, so I joined the Marine Corps enlisted in 2005. And oddly enough, when I first joined, I went to go into the infantry,

and then I got the opportunity to take this weird test called the Defense Language

Appitude Battery in boot camp, and ended up doing well enough on that to go to language school

and got the MOS of cryptological linguist.

It was a 2674, cryptological Spanish linguist, actually.

And so, long story short, I ended up at a place called the Texas Cryptologic Center in San Antonio, which is part of the NSA. And a lot of people don't know this. The NSA is actually NSA CSS. So it's CSS part stands for, oh, dang, I'm blanking on this. But that's how secret it is. Yeah, that's how secret it is. You know, I had this whole thing in my mind before,

but I, this, this makes me look bad, but I have to look it up. Yeah, Central Security Service.

So the CSS part is actually refers to the uniformed component of the NSA, right?

So you have a bunch of NSA civilians, including employees and contractors,

but then you have a lot of military personnel who are working at the NSA.

And so that I was attached to the NSA as a Marine and got to get into all kinds of signals intelligence work.

You got to deploy to the Middle East.

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