During World War II, he was assigned here as a secret agent, with duties focused on intercepting Portuguese ships that smuggled diamonds from Africa to Germany.
Some groups had very specific forms of resistance and became extremely specialized, like, many of whose members worked in the postal service, which focused on intercepting letters of denunciation and then warning the denounced person to flee.
"The Russians claim they have a new system under development that focuses on intercepting missiles in the boost phase," or shortly after they have been launched.
Since the NSA focuses on intercepting and analyzing communications for security purposes, it was a no-brainer that it asked the phone companies for the information, said Arthur Hulnick, an intelligence expert at Boston University, who likened the NSA to a giant vacuum cleaner.
Many security experts say the security agency is too focused on technologies for intercepting things — guns, knives, explosives — instead of focusing on stopping people.
But General Alexander's deputy, John C. Inglis, who has spent nearly three decades at the N.S.A. focused on the technology of intercepting and decoding foreign communications, told Congress last week that so far there was no satisfying alternative to a government library of calls and, seemingly by extension, text messages and many Internet searches.
In effect, the whole day's proceedings focused on just one of the seven counts on the indictment which alleges that Brooks, Coulson, Stuart Kuttner, the newspaper's former managing editor, and Ian Edmondson, the former news editor, conspired to intercept voicemail messages.
Both solutions, according to the F.T.C. news release, "focus on intercepting and filtering out illegal prerecorded calls using technology to 'blacklist' robocaller phone numbers and 'whitelist' numbers associated with acceptable incoming calls".
In the final weeks of the year, American intelligence officials, using spy satellites and communication intercepts, were intently focused on pinpointing the location of Qaeda fighters so the Yemeni military could strike them.
Chris Wiesinger, President of Trace Intercept, a consultancy focused on issues related to digital identity, sees the upside to adopting new technologies as far greater than the potential risks.
The protesters were bused to the Erez crossing point by Waed, a Hamas-affiliated group focused on freeing Palestinian prisoners in Israel, and they intercepted the motorcade as it entered Gaza.
