Pennsylvania Daybook

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NED comes to Nanticoke elementary schools

<p>Stay frosty, Santa. NORAD&#8217;s watching.</p><p>For the 61st year, the Claus cruise is being tracked by the North American Aerospace Defense Command.</p><p>Well, technically, for the first few years it was the Continental Air Defense, but CONAD is an unattractive acronym, though it could be worse. If they hadn&#8217;t added the &#8220;ON&#8221; from &#8220;CONtinental,&#8221; Santa would have been stalked by a CAD.</p><p>And &#8220;continental&#8221; isn&#8217;t very descriptive. Could be North America, could be Antarctica. Could be on Degobah (you know, home of old Yoda it was).</p><p>According to the NORAD website, this all started in 1955 when a store ran an ad with a number to call if you wanted to talk to Santa, and it turned out to be a call to CONAD. The brass in charge ran with it.</p><p>Back then, it may have made sense for the U.S. military to go to DEFCON Kringle and have instruments focus on Father Christmas. After all, there was no easy way to track Jolly Old in the old days. But now?</p><p>Even if we need to know the location of Elf Force One every second on Christmas Eve, is this an invasion of privacy? Shouldn&#8217;t it be up to Big Red, who surely could simply live-stream his trip on, say, Facebook or Twitter, or sign into one of the location-sharing apps?</p><p>And how does NORAD know this is the real St. Nick? The guy has been fitting down chimneys for years, not to mention getting into houses that lack a fireplace, or in some cases even a window that opens.</p><p>He had serious secrecy skills before radar was a blip on the government&#8217;s, um, radar.</p><p>Odds are if he wants to, the bearded bag bearer could launch a decoy sled to dupe NORAD, then complete his red ops in some fancy stealth sleigh with eight reindeer as invisible as a Navy SEAL team.</p><p>And how much is this operation costing? Sure, the NORAD website contends that emails and calls are handled by volunteers, but somebody maintains what has become a pretty sophisticated website at <a href="http://www.noradsanta.org/" target="_blank">www.noradsanta.org</a>, including a mobile app. Santa&#8217;s gifts may be free, but domain names, internet servers, phone lines and web designers usually aren&#8217;t.</p><p>Actually, if you wander around the website for a while, you may get a kick out of it. They must be doing something right, it gets some serious hits. And when you think about it, anything that could get youngsters contemplating national defense &#8212; or the tech it takes to pull it all off &#8212; has merit.</p><p>There&#8217;s the bonus of parents having a distraction for tots growing hyper-antsy about Mr. C&#8217;s progress.</p><p>So, fine, maybe Santa Tracker <em>is</em> kind of cool. But NORAD shouldn&#8217;t get too full of itself. Seriously, they know the day and time, and the target&#8217;s base of operations.</p><p>Tracking all those &#8220;secret Santas&#8221; at office parties would be more impressive.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Letters to Santa Page 3 </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/web1_Santa.jpg</photo0><caption0>Letters to Santa Page 3 </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>

Our view: Tracking Santa? NORAD effort has its merits