COMINT
Communications Intelligence — the SIGINT sub-discipline covering the content of intercepted communications
Audio readout of this entry.
COMINT — communications intelligence — is the SIGINT sub-discipline covering the content of intercepted communications. The standard US doctrinal definition (Joint Publication 2-0; Director of National Intelligence Intelligence Community Directive 113) is intelligence derived from communications between persons, distinguished from ELINT (intelligence derived from non-communications electronic signals, principally radar emissions) and from FISINT (intelligence derived from foreign instrumentation signals, principally missile and weapons-system telemetry). The three together — COMINT, ELINT, FISINT — exhaust the conventional SIGINT taxonomy.
The term dates to the World War II expansion of US and British signals services. The British equivalent collection apparatus was the Y Service — the network of interception stations operated by the Army, Navy, RAF, and Foreign Office; the American term, communications intelligence, was in active US service use before the war (the Navy's OP-20-G and the Army's Signal Intelligence Service used the term from the 1930s) and was regulated by the 1946 UKUSA Agreement (and its 1943 BRUSA predecessor). The institutional centres of US COMINT are the National Security Agency (NSA), the cryptologic centres of the five military service cryptologic components (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, and Space Force), and the Coast Guard cryptologic component. The British counterpart is GCHQ at Cheltenham; Canadian COMINT runs through the Communications Security Establishment (CSE); Australian through the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD); New Zealand through the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).
COMINT is the discipline within which the political and constitutional questions about signals intelligence have most often been litigated. The 1975 Church Committee inquiry into Project SHAMROCK and Project MINARET turned on COMINT — the bulk acquisition of telegram and cable traffic from US international communications carriers, and the watchlist-based monitoring of US persons within that bulk acquisition. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and its subsequent amendments — the 2008 Section 702 authorities, the 2015 USA Freedom Act constraints on Section 215 telephony-metadata collection — are the principal post-Watergate statutory framework for US COMINT. The 2013 Snowden disclosures concerned principally COMINT activity: PRISM downstream collection from US internet service providers, upstream collection from US telecommunications carriers, Tempora similar collection at GCHQ, the post-2008 Section 702 authorities under which much of it was conducted.
The technical and operational sub-categorisations within COMINT — the distinctions between bulk collection and targeted collection, between metadata acquisition and content acquisition, between domestic-end and foreign-end collection — are where the post-Snowden reform debate has principally turned. The institutional distinction between the content of a communication and the metadata about it (the to/from/when/where/how-long) is not a distinction the underlying SIGINT taxonomy itself makes; it is a US legal-framework distinction that has been built on top of the COMINT category for warrant-requirement purposes.
