My favourite bit of
Waltism is by Ram, himself:
oldlineman said:
This is Prof. Sunil Ram speaking... the real one not the guy up in Hunstville.
For what it is worth I started at 734 Comm Sqn Regina, I have served briefly with 1CSR Kingston and 731 Com Sqn CFB Shilo and I was a lineman!
Now if any of you know what the Pine Tree Line was and know anything about CFB Shilo at the height of the Cold War... then I don't need to explain myself anymore. For those of you who do not... read your own CF military history. Years later due to shortages of CELE officers I came back to the CF for a short stint as a SIGS officer. Now unless you happen to have a TS/level 3 SC you don't need to know any more.
...
The Pine Tree Line and the Comm Sqn at the
Bridge Site (the bunker) in Shilo were only, ever, loosely related. The Pine Tree Line was a 1950s and early '60s NORAD radar project with its own, dedicated, Royal Canadian Air Force communications network – remember SAGE/BUIC (Semi-Automated Ground Environment and Back Up Interceptor Control?) Project
Bridge was a Canadian Army semi-automated telecommunications system built
circa 1960 to handle the Army's traffic. After unification in the mid to late 1960s the various single service telecomm networks were integrated into the Canadian Forces Communications System (CFCS) later Command (CFCC). The
Bridge sites (bunkers at Nanaimo, Penhold, Shilo, Borden, Carp, etc) formed the main “nodes” of the network, but it was a standard, day-by-day, message handling system. SAGE, for example, continued in operation, passing radar/computer data from Pine Tree, Mid-Canada and DEW Line sites to NORAD Hqs in Canada and at Colorado Springs.
It may be that Sunil Ram need not explain himself to anyone but as a lineman at the “height of the Cold War” it is most likely that he has nothing to explain. Linemen are great folks, hard working, tough, fun to be around – and they work, at a
Bridge site, mainly in the “frame room” and on the outside plant. Much of that work is now done by civilian contractors who have no security clearances at all because they have no real, meaningful access to the classified “traffic' that flows through (but rarely stops at) a telecommunications nodal point.
Without
I stipulate knowing (or caring)
anything about Ram's service, I will agree that as a C&E Branch (Land) officer (who wore
Signals on their shoulder flashes but were
not, in the 1990s, an official sub-classification, as they are now) he likely had a TS clearance – most C&E officers do - to handle crypto keying material. That task (crypto keymat control and handling) is an essentially
clerical function. There are, as many members here know, several security clearance levels within and above TS. Security is a complex business.
I would remind you of Lao Tzu's wisdom which can be, roughly, translated as: “He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.” (Tao Te Ching -
Ch 56.) My
appreciation of the situation, based on what he writes and says, is that Sunil Ram says a lot but knows much less. But that's just my
opinion - and I say a lot, too.
