hotel in Hong Kong, where Edward Snowden hosted his first meeting with
Glenn Greenwald,
Laura Poitras, and journalist Ewen MacAskill of
The Guardian That year, Snowden had made his first contact with journalist
Glenn Greenwald, then employed by
The Guardian, and he contacted documentary filmmaker
Laura Poitras in January 2013.
2013 May In May 2013, Snowden went on temporary leave from his position at the NSA, citing the pretext of receiving treatment for his
epilepsy. He traveled from
Hawaii to
Hong Kong at the end of May. Greenwald, Poitras and
The Guardian's defence and intelligence correspondent
Ewen MacAskill flew to Hong Kong for meeting Snowden.
June After the U.S.-based editor of
The Guardian,
Janine Gibson, held several meetings in New York City, she decided that Greenwald, Poitras and the
Guardians defence and intelligence correspondent Ewen MacAskill would fly to Hong Kong to meet Snowden. On June 5, in the first media report based on the leaked material,
The Guardian exposed a
top secret court order showing that the NSA had collected phone records from over 120 million
Verizon subscribers. Under the order, the numbers of both parties on a call, as well as the location data, unique identifiers, time of call, and duration of call were handed over to the FBI, which turned over the records to the NSA.
surveillance program under which the NSA collects user data from companies such as
Facebook and
Microsoft. On June 6, 2013, the second media disclosure, the revelation of the
PRISM surveillance program (which collects the e-mail, voice, text and video chats of foreigners and an unknown number of Americans from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and other tech giants), was published simultaneously by
The Guardian and
The Washington Post. , showing a world map with the locations of XKeyscore servers
Der Spiegel revealed NSA spying on multiple diplomatic missions of the
European Union and the
United Nations Headquarters in New York. During specific episodes within a four-year period, the NSA hacked several Chinese mobile-phone companies, the
Chinese University of Hong Kong and
Tsinghua University in Beijing, and the Asian fiber-optic network operator
Pacnet. Only
Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK are explicitly exempted from NSA attacks, whose main target in the European Union is Germany. A method of bugging encrypted fax machines used at an EU embassy is codenamed
Dropmire. During the
2009 G-20 London summit, the British intelligence agency
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intercepted the communications of foreign diplomats. In addition, GCHQ has been intercepting and storing mass quantities of fiber-optic traffic via
Tempora. Two principal components of Tempora are called "
Mastering the Internet" (MTI) and "
Global Telecoms Exploitation". The data is preserved for three days while
metadata is kept for thirty days. Data collected by the
GCHQ under Tempora is shared with the
National Security Agency in the United States. which was later terminated due to operational and resource constraints. It was subsequently replaced by newer surveillance programs such as ShellTrumpet, which "
processed its one trillionth metadata record" by the end of December 2012. The NSA follows specific procedures to target non-U.S. persons and to minimize data collection from U.S. persons. These court-approved policies allow the NSA to: • keep data that could potentially contain details of U.S. persons for up to five years; • retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity; • preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within
attorney–client communications; and • access the content of communications gathered from "U.S.-based machine[s]" or phone numbers to establish if targets are located in the U.S., for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance. According to
Boundless Informant, over 97 billion pieces of intelligence were collected over 30 days ending in March 2013. Out of all 97 billion sets of information, about 3 billion
data sets originated from U.S. computer networks and around 500 million metadata records were collected from German networks. In August 2013, it was revealed that the
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) of Germany transfers massive amounts of metadata records to the NSA.
Der Spiegel disclosed that out of all
27 member states of the European Union, Germany is the most targeted due to the NSA's systematic monitoring and storage of Germany's telephone and Internet connection data. According to the magazine, the NSA stores data from around half a billion communications connections in Germany each month. This data includes telephone calls, emails, mobile phone text messages, and chat transcripts. '' published a snapshot of the NSA's global map of electronic data collection for March 2013. Known as the
Boundless Informant, the program is used by the NSA to track the amount of data being analyzed over a specific period of time. The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance). Outside the Middle East, only China, Germany, India,
Kenya, and the United States are colored orange or yellow
July The NSA gained massive amounts of information captured from the monitored data traffic in Europe. For example, in December 2012, the NSA gathered on an average day metadata from some 15 million telephone connections and 10 million Internet datasets. The NSA also monitored the European Commission in Brussels and monitored EU diplomatic Facilities in Washington and at the United Nations by placing bugs in offices as well as infiltrating computer networks. The U.S. government made as part of its
UPSTREAM data collection program deals with companies to ensure that it had access to and hence the capability to surveil undersea fiber-optic cables which deliver e-mails, Web pages, other electronic communications and phone calls from one continent to another at the speed of light. According to the Brazilian newspaper
O Globo, the NSA spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilian citizens, while Australia and New Zealand have been involved in the joint operation of the NSA's global analytical system
XKeyscore. Among the numerous
allied facilities contributing to XKeyscore are four installations in Australia and one in New Zealand: •
Pine Gap near
Alice Springs, Australia, which is partly operated by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) According to Edward Snowden, the NSA has established secret intelligence partnerships with many
Western governments. In an interview published by
Der Spiegel, Snowden accused the NSA of being "in bed together with the Germans". The NSA granted the German intelligence agencies
BND (foreign intelligence) and
BfV (domestic intelligence) access to its controversial
XKeyscore system. In return, the BND turned over copies of two systems named Mira4 and Veras, reported to exceed the NSA's SIGINT capabilities in certain areas. In a document dated January 2013, the NSA acknowledged the efforts of the BND to undermine
privacy laws: According to an NSA document dated April 2013, Germany has now become the NSA's "most prolific partner". The two programs are "not identical". Microsoft "developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the interception of encrypted chats on
Outlook.com, within five months after the service went into testing. NSA had access to Outlook.com emails because "Prism collects this data before encryption." In addition, Microsoft worked with the FBI to enable the NSA to gain access to its
cloud storage service SkyDrive. An internal NSA document dating from August 3, 2012, described the PRISM surveillance program as a "
team sport". Snowden also confirmed that
Stuxnet was cooperatively developed by the United States and Israel. In a report unrelated to Edward Snowden, the French newspaper
Le Monde revealed that France's
DGSE was also undertaking mass surveillance, which it described as "illegal and outside any serious control".
August Documents leaked by Edward Snowden that were seen by
Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and
Norddeutscher Rundfunk revealed that several
telecom operators have played a key role in helping the British intelligence agency
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) tap into worldwide
fiber-optic communications. The telecom operators are: •
Verizon Business (codenamed "Dacron") •
BT (codenamed "Remedy") Telecommunication companies that participated were "forced" to do so and had "no choice in the matter". The U.S. runs a top-secret surveillance program known as the
Special Collection Service (SCS), which is based in over 80 U.S. consulates and embassies worldwide. The NSA hacked the United Nations' video conferencing system in Summer 2012 in violation of a UN agreement. It also spied on
Al Jazeera and gained access to its internal communications systems. The NSA has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic. U.S. Law-enforcement agencies use tools used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects. An internal NSA audit from May 2012 identified 2776 incidents i.e. violations of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans and foreign targets in the U.S. in the period from April 2011 through March 2012, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes are not intentional. The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do so and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. A legal opinion declassified on August 21, 2013, revealed that the NSA intercepted for three years as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans not suspected of having links to terrorism, before a FISA court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011. Under the Corporate Partner Access project, major U.S. telecommunications providers receive hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the NSA. Voluntary cooperation between the NSA and the providers of global communications took off during the 1970s under the cover name
BLARNEY. The NSA paid GCHQ over £100 million between 2009 and 2012; in exchange for these funds, GCHQ "must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight." Documents referenced in the article explain that the weaker British laws regarding spying are "a selling point" for the NSA. GCHQ is also developing the technology to "exploit any mobile phone at any time." The NSA has under a legal authority a secret backdoor into its databases gathered from large Internet companies enabling it to search for U.S. citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant. The
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board urged the U.S. intelligence chiefs to draft stronger US surveillance guidelines on domestic spying after finding that several of those guidelines have not been updated up to 30 years. U.S. intelligence analysts have deliberately broken rules designed to prevent them from spying on Americans by choosing to ignore so-called "minimisation procedures" aimed at protecting privacy and used the NSA agency's enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests. After the U.S.
Foreign Secret Intelligence Court ruled in October 2011 that some of the NSA's activities were unconstitutional, the agency paid millions of dollars to major internet companies to cover extra costs incurred in their involvement with the PRISM surveillance program. "
Mastering the Internet" (MTI) is part of the
Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) of the British government that involves the insertion of thousands of DPI (
deep packet inspection) "black boxes" at various
internet service providers, as revealed by the British media in 2009. In 2013, it was further revealed that the NSA had made a £17.2 million financial contribution to the project, which is capable of vacuuming signals from up to 200 fibre-optic cables at all physical points of entry into Great Britain.
September The
Guardian and
The New York Times reported on secret documents leaked by Snowden showing that the NSA has been in "collaboration with technology companies" as part of "an aggressive, multipronged effort" to weaken the
encryption used in commercial software, and GCHQ has a team dedicated to cracking "Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook" traffic. Germany's domestic security agency
Bundesverfassungsschutz (BfV) systematically transfers the personal data of German residents to the NSA, CIA, and seven other members of the
United States Intelligence Community, in exchange for information and espionage software. Israel, Sweden and Italy are also cooperating with American and British intelligence agencies. Under a secret treaty codenamed "
Lustre", French intelligence agencies transferred millions of metadata records to the NSA. The Obama Administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans' communications in its massive databases. The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner "reasonably believed" to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year. But a warrant for each target would thus no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies, or "foreign powers." The FISC extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years, with an extension possible for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. Both measures were done without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. A special branch of the NSA called "Follow the Money" (FTM) monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions and later stores the collected data in the NSA's own financial databank "Tracfin". The NSA monitored the communications of Brazil's president
Dilma Rousseff and her top aides. The agency also spied on Brazil's oil firm
Petrobras as well as French diplomats, and gained access to the private network of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France and the
SWIFT network. In the United States, the NSA uses the analysis of phone calls and e-mail logs of American citizens to create sophisticated graphs of their social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions, and other personal information. The NSA routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about U.S. citizens. In an effort codenamed GENIE, computer specialists can control foreign computer networks using "covert implants," a form of remotely transmitted malware on tens of thousands of devices annually. As worldwide sales of
smartphones began exceeding those of
feature phones, the NSA decided to take advantage of the smartphone boom. This is particularly advantageous because the smartphone combines a
myriad of data that would interest an intelligence agency, such as social contacts, user behavior, interests, location, photos, and credit card numbers and passwords. According to the document, the NSA has set up
task forces assigned to several smartphone manufacturers and
operating systems, including
Apple Inc.'s
iPhone and
iOS operating system, as well as
Google's
Android mobile operating system.
October On October 4, 2013,
The Washington Post and
The Guardian jointly reported that the NSA and GCHQ had made repeated attempts to spy on anonymous Internet users who have been communicating in secret via the anonymity network
Tor. Several of these surveillance operations involved the implantation of malicious code into the computers of Tor users who visit particular websites. The NSA and GCHQ had partly succeeded in blocking access to the anonymous network, diverting Tor users to insecure channels. The government agencies were also able to uncover the identity of some anonymous Internet users. The
Communications Security Establishment (CSE) has been using a program called Olympia to map the communications of Brazil's
Mines and Energy Ministry by targeting the metadata of phone calls and emails to and from the ministry. The Australian Federal Government knew about the PRISM surveillance program months before Edward Snowden made details public. The NSA gathered hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world. The agency did not target individuals. Instead it collected contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world's e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets. The NSA monitored the public email account of former Ex-Mexican president
Felipe Calderón (thus gaining access to the communications of high-ranking cabinet members), the emails of several high-ranking members of Mexico's security forces and text and the mobile phone communication of Ex-Mexican president
Enrique Peña Nieto. The NSA tries to gather cellular and landline phone numbers—often obtained from American diplomats—for as many foreign officials as possible. The contents of the phone calls are stored in computer databases that can regularly be searched using keywords. The NSA has been monitoring telephone conversations of 35 world leaders.
The Guardian revealed that the NSA had been monitoring telephone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another U.S. government department. A confidential memo revealed that the NSA encouraged senior officials in such Departments as the
White House,
State, and
The Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency could add the telephone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems. Reacting to the news, German leader
Angela Merkel, arriving in
Brussels for an
EU summit, accused the U.S. of a breach of trust, saying: "We need to have trust in our allies and partners, and this must now be established once again. I repeat that spying among friends is not at all acceptable against anyone, and that goes for every citizen in Germany." The NSA collected in 2010 data on ordinary Americans' cellphone locations, but later discontinued it because it had no "operational value." Under Britain's
MUSCULAR programme, the NSA and GCHQ have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect
Yahoo and
Google data centers around the world and thereby gained the ability to collect metadata and
content at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts. The mobile phone of German Chancellor
Angela Merkel might have been tapped by U.S. intelligence. and ended in the summer of 2013, while
The New York Times reported that Germany has evidence that the NSA's surveillance of Merkel began during
George W. Bush's tenure. After learning from
Der Spiegel magazine that the NSA has been listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel compared the snooping practices of the NSA with those of the
Stasi. It was reported in March 2014 by
Der Spiegel that Merkel had also been placed on an NSA surveillance list alongside 122 other world leaders. On October 31, 2013,
Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of the
German Bundestag who visited Snowden in Russia, reported on Snowden's willingness to provide details of the NSA's espionage program. A highly sensitive signals intelligence collection program known as
Stateroom involves the interception of radio, telecommunications, and internet traffic. It is operated out of the diplomatic missions of the
Five Eyes (Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, United States) in numerous locations around the world. The program conducted at U.S. diplomatic missions is run in concert by the U.S. intelligence agencies NSA and CIA in a joint venture group called "
Special Collection Service" (SCS), whose members work undercover in shielded areas of the American Embassies and Consulates, where they are officially accredited as diplomats and as such enjoy special privileges. Under diplomatic protection, they can look and listen unhindered. The SCS, for example, used the American Embassy near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to monitor communications in Germany's government district with its parliament and the seat of the government. Under the Stateroom surveillance programme, Australia operates clandestine surveillance facilities to intercept phone calls and data across much of Asia. In France, the NSA targeted people belonging to the worlds of business, politics, or the French state administration. The NSA monitored and recorded the content of telephone communications and the history of the connections of each target, i.e., the metadata. The actual surveillance operation was performed by French intelligence agencies on behalf of the NSA. The cooperation between France and the NSA was confirmed by the Director of the NSA,
Keith B. Alexander, who asserted that foreign intelligence services collected phone records in "war zones" and "other areas outside their borders" and provided them to the NSA. The French newspaper
Le Monde also disclosed new
PRISM and Upstream slides coming from the "PRISM/US-984XN Overview" presentation. In Spain, the NSA intercepted the telephone conversations, text messages, and emails of millions of Spaniards and spied on members of the Spanish government. Between December 10, 2012, and January 8, 2013, the NSA collected metadata on 60 million telephone calls in Spain. According to documents leaked by Snowden, the surveillance of Spanish citizens was jointly conducted by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of Spain. '' published a
PowerPoint presentation leaked by Snowden, showing how the NSA had compromised the
Tor encrypted network that is being employed by hundreds of thousands of people to circumvent "nation state internet policies". By secretly exploiting a
JavaScript plug-in, the NSA found out the identities of various anonymous
Internet users such as dissidents, terrorists, and other targets
November The New York Times reported that the NSA carried out an eavesdropping effort, dubbed Operation Dreadnought, against the Iranian leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. During his 2009 visit to
Iranian Kurdistan, the agency collaborated with GCHQ and the U.S.'s
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, collecting radio transmissions between aircraft and airports, examining Khamenei's convoy with satellite imagery, and enumerating military radar stations. According to the story, an objective of the operation is "communications fingerprinting": the ability to distinguish Khamenei's communications from those of other people in
Iran. The same story revealed an operation code-named Ironavenger, in which the NSA intercepted e-mails sent between a country allied with the United States and the government of "an adversary". The ally was conducting a
spear-phishing attack: its e-mails contained
malware. The NSA gathered documents and
login credentials belonging to the enemy country, along with knowledge of the ally's capabilities for
attacking computers. Operating under the code-name "Quantum Insert", GCHQ set up a fake website masquerading as
LinkedIn, a social website used for
professional networking, as part of its efforts to install surveillance software on the computers of the telecommunications operator
Belgacom. In addition, the headquarters of the oil cartel
OPEC were infiltrated by GCHQ as well as the NSA, which bugged the computers of nine OPEC employees and monitored the
General Secretary of OPEC. First tested in 2010, the aim of the "Royal Concierge" is to track down the travel plans of diplomats, and it is often supplemented with surveillance methods related to
human intelligence (HUMINT). Other covert operations include the wiretapping of room telephones and fax machines used in targeted hotels, as well as the monitoring of computers hooked up to the hotel network. Other high-ranking Indonesian politicians targeted by the DSD include: •
Boediono (Vice President) •
Jusuf Kalla Toward the end of November,
The New York Times released an internal NSA report outlining the agency's efforts to expand its surveillance abilities. The five-page document asserts that the
law of the United States has not kept up with the needs of the NSA to conduct mass surveillance in the "golden age" of
signals intelligence, but there are grounds for optimism because, in the NSA's own words: The report, titled "
SIGINT Strategy 2012–2016", also said that the U.S. will try to influence the "global commercial encryption market" through "commercial relationships", and emphasized the need to "revolutionize" the analysis of its vast data collection to "radically increase operational impact". The Dutch Newspaper also reported that NSA infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide, often covertly, with malicious spy software, sometimes in cooperation with local authorities, designed to steal sensitive information. These five "Classes of Accesses" are:
December According to the classified documents leaked by Snowden, the
Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), formerly known as the Defense Signals Directorate, had offered to share intelligence information it had collected with the other intelligence agencies of the
UKUSA Agreement. Data shared with foreign countries includes "bulk, unselected, unminimized metadata" that it had collected. The ASD provided such information on the condition that no Australian citizens were targeted. At the time, the ASD assessed that "unintentional collection [of metadata of Australian nationals] is not viewed as a significant issue". If a target was later identified as being an Australian national, the ASD was required to be contacted to ensure that a warrant could be sought. Consideration was given as to whether "medical, legal, or religious information" would be automatically treated differently from other types of data; a decision was made that each agency would make such determinations on a case-by-case basis. Leaked material does not specify where the ASD had collected the intelligence information from, however Section 7(a) of the Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Commonwealth) states that the ASD's role is "...to obtain intelligence about the capabilities, intentions or activities of people or organizations outside Australia...". As such, it is possible ASD's metadata intelligence holdings was focused on foreign intelligence collection and was within the bounds of Australian law.
The Washington Post revealed that the NSA has been tracking the locations of mobile phones from all over the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. In the process of doing so, the NSA collects more than five billion records of phone locations on a daily basis. This enables NSA analysts to map cellphone owners' relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. The Washington Post also reported that both GCHQ and the NSA make use of location data and advertising tracking files generated through normal internet browsing (with
cookies operated by Google, known as "Pref") to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance. The
Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS), which cooperates with the NSA, has gained access to Russian targets in the
Kola Peninsula and other civilian targets. In general, the NIS provides information to the NSA about "Politicians", "Energy" and "Armament". A
top secret memo of the NSA lists the following years as milestones of the Norway–United States of America SIGINT agreement, or
NORUS Agreement: • 1952 – Informal starting year of cooperation between the NIS and the NSA • 1954 – Formalization of the agreement The Swedish-American surveillance operation also targeted Russian energy interests as well as the
Baltic states. As part of the
UKUSA Agreement, a secret treaty was signed in 1954 by Sweden with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, regarding collaboration and intelligence sharing. As a result of Snowden's disclosures, the notion of
Swedish neutrality in international politics was called into question. In an internal document dating from the year 2006, the NSA acknowledged that its "relationship" with Sweden is "protected at the TOP SECRET level because of that nation's
political neutrality." Specific details of Sweden's cooperation with members of the UKUSA Agreement include: • The FRA has been granted access to
XKeyscore, an analytical database of the NSA. • Sweden updated the NSA on changes in
Swedish legislation that provided the legal framework for information sharing between the FRA and the
Swedish Security Service. while also introducing several provisions designed to protect the privacy of individuals, according to the original proposal. This legislation was amended 11 months later, in an effort to strengthen protection of privacy by making court orders a requirement, and by imposing several limits on the intelligence-gathering. According to documents leaked by Snowden, the
Special Source Operations of the NSA has been sharing information containing "logins, cookies, and GooglePREFID" with the
Tailored Access Operations division of the NSA, as well as Britain's GCHQ agency. During the
2010 G-20 Toronto summit, the
U.S. embassy in Ottawa was transformed into a security command post during a six-day spying operation that was conducted by the NSA and closely coordinated with the
Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). The goal of the spying operation was, among others, to obtain information on international development, banking reform, and to counter trade protectionism to support "U.S. policy goals." On behalf of the NSA, the CSEC has set up covert spying posts in 20 countries around the world. According to a secret NSA memo dated September 2010, the
Italian embassy in Washington, D.C. has been targeted by two spy operations of the NSA: • Under the codename "Bruneau", which refers to mission "Lifesaver", the NSA sucks out all the information stored in the embassy's computers and creates electronic images of
hard disk drives. The NSA has cracked the most commonly used cellphone encryption technology,
A5/1. According to a classified document leaked by Snowden, the agency can "process encrypted A5/1" even when it has not acquired an encryption key. In addition, the NSA uses various types of cellphone infrastructure, such as the links between carrier networks, to determine the location of a cellphone user tracked by
Visitor Location Registers. US district court judge for the District of Columbia, Richard Leon,
declared on December 16, 2013, that the mass collection of metadata of Americans' telephone records by the National Security Agency probably violates the
fourth amendment prohibition of unreasonable
searches and seizures. and ordered the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered. But the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his 68-page opinion the "significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues." However, federal judge William H. Pauley III in New York City
ruled the U.S. government's global telephone data-gathering system is needed to thwart potential terrorist attacks, and that it can only work if everyone's calls are swept in. U.S. District Judge Pauley also ruled that Congress legally set up the program and that it does not violate anyone's constitutional rights. The judge also concluded that the telephone data being swept up by the SA did not belong to telephone users, but to the telephone companies. He further ruled that when the NSA obtains such data from the telephone companies, and then probes into it to find links between callers and potential terrorists, this further use of the data was not even a search under the Fourth Amendment. He also concluded that the controlling precedent is
Smith v. Maryland: "Smith's bedrock holding is that an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information provided to third parties," Judge Pauley wrote. The American Civil Liberties Union declared on January 2, 2012, that it will appeal Judge Pauley's ruling that NSA bulk the phone record collection is legal. "The government has a legitimate interest in tracking the associations of suspected terrorists, but tracking those associations does not require the government to subject every citizen to permanent surveillance," deputy ACLU legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement. In recent years, American and British intelligence agencies conducted surveillance on more than 1,100 targets, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies, and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.
2014 January The NSA is working to build a powerful
quantum computer capable of breaking all types of encryption. The effort is part of a US$79.7 million research program known as "Penetrating Hard Targets". It involves extensive research carried out in large, shielded rooms known as
Faraday cagess, which are designed to prevent
electromagnetic radiation from entering or leaving. Once a quantum computer is successfully built, it would enable the NSA to unlock the encryption that protects data held by banks, credit card companies, retailers, brokerages, governments and health care providers. GCHQ has been given full access to the database, which it uses to obtain personal information of Britons by exploiting a legal loophole. Each day, the database receives and stores the following amounts of data: •
Geolocation data of more than 76,000 text messages and other travel information The
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on mass surveillance was released on January 23, 2014. It recommends to end the bulk telephone metadata, i.e., bulk phone records – phone numbers dialed, call times and durations, but not call content collection – collection program, to create a "Special Advocate" to be involved in some cases before the FISA court judge and to release future and past FISC decisions "that involve novel interpretations of FISA or other significant questions of law, technology or compliance." According to a joint disclosure by
The New York Times,
The Guardian, and
ProPublica, the NSA and GCHQ have begun working together to collect and store data from dozens of
smartphone application software by 2007 at the latest. A 2008 GCHQ report, leaked by Snowden, asserts that "anyone using
Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system". The NSA and GCHQ have traded recipes for various purposes such as grabbing location data and journey plans that are made when a target uses
Google Maps, and vacuuming up
address books,
buddy lists,
phone logs and geographic data embedded in photos posted on the mobile versions of numerous social networks such as Facebook,
Flickr,
LinkedIn, Twitter, and other services. In a separate 20-page report dated 2012, GCHQ cited the popular smartphone game "
Angry Birds" as an example of how an application could be used to extract user data. Taken together, such forms of data collection would allow the agencies to collect vital information about a user's life, including his or her home country, current location (through
geolocation), age, gender,
ZIP code,
marital status, income,
ethnicity,
sexual orientation, education level, number of children, etc. A GCHQ document dated August 2012 provided details of the
Squeaky Dolphin surveillance program, which enables GCHQ to conduct broad,
real-time monitoring of various
social media features and social media traffic such as YouTube video views, the
Like button on Facebook, and
Blogspot/Blogger visits without the knowledge or consent of the companies providing those social media features. The agency's "Squeaky Dolphin" program can collect, analyze, and utilize YouTube, Facebook, and Blogger data in specific situations in real time for analysis purposes. The program also collects the addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information for analysis purposes. During the
2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the NSA and its
Five Eyes partners monitored the communications of delegates of numerous countries. This was done to give their own policymakers a negotiating advantage. The
Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) has been tracking Canadian air passengers via free
Wi-Fi services at a major Canadian airport. Passengers who exited the airport terminal continued to be tracked as they showed up at other
Wi-Fi locations across Canada. In a CSEC document dated May 2012, the agency described how it had gained access to two communications systems with over 300,000 userstoo pinpoint a specific imaginary target. The operation was executed on behalf of the NSA as a trial run to test a new technology capable of tracking down "any target that makes occasional forays into other cities/regions." This technology was subsequently shared with Canada's
Five Eyes partners – Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States. '' released GCHQ launched a
cyber-attack on the activist network "
Anonymous", using
denial-of-service attack (DoS) to shut down a chatroom frequented by the network's members and to spy on them. The attack, dubbed Rolling Thunder, was conducted by a GCHQ unit known as the
Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). The unit successfully uncovered the true identities of several Anonymous members. The NSA Section 215 bulk telephony metadata program, which seeks to stockpile records on all calls made in the U.S., is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans' call records because of an inability to keep pace with the explosion in cellphone use, according to
The Washington Post. The controversial program permits the NSA, after a warrant granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to record numbers, length, and location of every call from the participating carriers.
The Intercept reported that the U.S. government is using primarily NSA surveillance to target people for drone strikes overseas. In its report
The Intercept author details the flawed methods that are used to locate targets for lethal drone strikes, resulting in the deaths of innocent people. According to the Washington Post NSA analysts and collectors i.e. NSA personnel which controls electronic surveillance equipment use the NSA's sophisticated surveillance capabilities to track individual targets geographically and in real time, while drones and tactical units aimed their weaponry against those targets to take them out. An unnamed US law firm, reported to be
Mayer Brown, was targeted by Australia's
ASD. According to Snowden's documents, the ASD had offered to hand over these intercepted communications to the NSA. This allowed government authorities to be "able to continue to cover the talks, providing highly useful intelligence for interested US customers". NSA and GCHQ documents revealed that the anti-secrecy organization
WikiLeaks and other
activist groups were targeted for government surveillance and criminal prosecution. In particular, the
IP addresses of visitors to WikiLeaks were collected in real time, and the US government urged its allies to file criminal charges against the founder of WikiLeaks,
Julian Assange, due to his organization's publication of the
Afghanistan war logs. The WikiLeaks organization was designated as a "malicious foreign actor". Quoting an unnamed NSA official in Germany,
Bild am Sonntag reported that while President Obama's order to stop spying on Merkel was being obeyed, the focus had shifted to bugging other leading government and business figures, including Interior Minister
Thomas de Maiziere, a close confidant of Merkel. Caitlin Hayden, a security adviser to President Obama, was quoted in the newspaper report as saying, "The US has made clear it gathers intelligence in the same way as any other state."
The Intercept reveals that government agencies are infiltrating online communities and engaging in "false flag operations" to discredit targets, among them people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats. The two main tactics that are currently used are the injection of all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and the use of social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. The Guardian reported that Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing. The surveillance program codenamed
Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats (one image every five minutes) in bulk and saved them to agency databases. The agency discovered "that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person", estimating that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity".
March The NSA has built an infrastructure that enables it to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process. The NSA relies on an automated system codenamed
TURBINE, which in essence enables the automated management and control of a large network of implants (a form of remotely transmitted malware on selected individual computer devices or in bulk on tens of thousands of devices). As quoted by
The Intercept, TURBINE is designed to "allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually." The NSA has shared many of its files on the use of implants with its counterparts in the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance – the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Among other things, due to TURBINE and its control over the implants, the NSA is capable of: • breaking into targeted computers and siphoning out data from foreign Internet and phone networks • infecting a target's computer and exfiltrating files from a hard drive • covertly recording audio from a computer's microphone and taking snapshots with its webcam • launching cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites • exfiltrating data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer The TURBINE implants are linked to, and rely upon, a large network of clandestine surveillance "sensors" that the NSA has installed at locations across the world, including the agency's headquarters in Maryland and eavesdropping bases used by the agency in Misawa, Japan, and Menwith Hill, England. Codenamed TURMOIL, the sensors operate as a sort of high-tech surveillance dragnet, monitoring packets of data as they are sent across the Internet. When TURBINE implants exfiltrate data from infected computer systems, the TURMOIL sensors automatically identify the data and return it to the NSA for analysis. And when targets are communicating, the TURMOIL system can be used to send alerts or "tips" to TURBINE, enabling the initiation of a malware attack. To identify surveillance targets, the NSA uses a series of data "selectors" as they flow across Internet cables. These selectors can include email addresses, IP addresses, or the unique "cookies" containing a username or other identifying information that are sent to a user's computer by websites such as Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Twitter, unique Google advertising cookies that track browsing habits, unique encryption key fingerprints that can be traced to a specific user, and computer IDs that are sent across the Internet when a Windows computer crashes or updates. The CIA was accused by U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of spying on a stand-alone computer network established for the committee in its investigation of allegations of CIA abuse in a George W. Bush-era detention and interrogation program. A voice interception program codenamed
MYSTIC began in 2009. Along with RETRO, short for "retrospective retrieval" (RETRO is a voice audio recording buffer that allows retrieval of captured content up to 30 days into the past), the MYSTIC program is capable of recording "100 percent" of a foreign country's telephone calls, enabling the NSA to rewind and review conversations up to 30 days and the related metadata. With the capability to store up to 30 days of recorded conversations, MYSTIC enables the NSA to pull an instant history of the person's movements, associates, and plans. On March 21,
Le Monde published slides from an internal presentation of the
Communications Security Establishment Canada, which attributed a piece of malicious software to French intelligence. The CSEC presentation concluded that the list of malware victims matched French intelligence priorities and found French cultural reference in the malware's code, including the name
Babar, a popular French children's character, and the developer name "Titi". The French telecommunications corporation
Orange S.A. shares its call data with the French intelligence agency DGSE, which hands over the intercepted data to GCHQ. The NSA has spied on the Chinese technology company
Huawei. Huawei is a leading manufacturer of smartphones, tablets, mobile phone infrastructure, and WLAN routers and installs fiber optic cable. According to
Der Spiegel this "kind of technology ... is decisive in the NSA's battle for data supremacy." The US government has had longstanding concerns that Huawei may not be independent of the
People's Liberation Army and that the Chinese government might use equipment manufactured by Huawei to conduct cyberespionage or cyberwarfare. The goals of the NSA operation were to assess the relationship between Huawei and the PLA, to learn more about the Chinese government's plans, and to use information from Huawei to spy on Huawei's customers, including Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, and Cuba. Former Chinese President
Hu Jintao, the Chinese Trade Ministry, banks, as well as telecommunications companies, were also targeted by the NSA. At the end of March 2014,
Der Spiegel and
The Intercept published, based on a series of classified files from the archive provided to reporters by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, articles related to espionage efforts by GCHQ and NSA in Germany. The British GCHQ targeted three German internet firms for information about Internet traffic passing through internet exchange points, important customers of the German internet providers, their technology suppliers as well as future technical trends in their business sector and company employees.
April Toward the end of April, Edward Snowden said that the United States surveillance agencies spy on Americans more than anyone else in the world, contrary to anything that has been said by the government up until this point.
May An article published by Ars Technica shows NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) employees intercepting a Cisco router.
The Intercept and
WikiLeaks revealed information about which countries were having their communications collected as part of the
MYSTIC surveillance program. On May 19,
The Intercept reported that the NSA is recording and archiving nearly every cell phone conversation in the Bahamas with a system called SOMALGET, a subprogram of
MYSTIC. The mass surveillance has been occurring without the Bahamian government's permission. Aside from the Bahamas,
The Intercept reported NSA interception of cell phone metadata in
Kenya, the
Philippines,
Mexico, and a fifth country it did not name due to "credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence." WikiLeaks released a statement on May 23 claiming that
Afghanistan was the unnamed nation. In a statement responding to the revelations, the NSA said "the implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is arbitrary and unconstrained is false."
June Vodafone revealed that there were secret wires that allowed government agencies direct access to their networks. This access does not require warrants, and the direct access wire is often equipped in a locked room. The Danish newspaper
Dagbladet Information and
The Intercept revealed on June 19, 2014, the NSA mass surveillance program codenamed
RAMPART-A. Under RAMPART-A, 'third-party' countries tap into fiber optic cables carrying the majority of the world's electronic communications and are secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on these fiber-optic cables. The foreign partners of the NSA turn massive amounts of data, like the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype,e over to the NSA. In return, these partners receive access to the NSA's sophisticated surveillance equipment so that they too can spy on the mass of data that flows in and out of their territory. Among the partners participating in the NSA mass surveillance program are Denmark and Germany.
July During the week of July 4, a 31-year-old male employee of
Germany's intelligence service
BND was arrested on suspicion of
spying for the
United States. The employee is suspected of spying on the
German Parliamentary Committee investigating the NSA spying scandal. Former NSA official and whistleblower
William Binney spoke at a
Centre for Investigative Journalism conference in London. According to Binney, "at least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores." He also stated that the majority of
fiber optic cables run through the U.S., which "is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in."
The Washington Post released a review of a cache provided by Snowden containing roughly 160,000 text messages and e-mails intercepted by the NSA between 2009 and 2012. The newspaper concluded that nine out of ten account holders whose conversations were recorded by the agency "were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else." In its analysis,
The Post also noted that many of the account holders were Americans. On July 9, a soldier working within
Germany's Federal Ministry of Defence (BMVg) fell under suspicion of spying for the United States. As a result of the July 4 case and this one, the German government expelled the CIA station chief in Germany on July 17. On July 18, former State Department official
John Tye released an editorial in
The Washington Post, highlighting concerns over data collection under
Executive Order 12333. Tye's concerns are rooted in classified material he had access to through the State Department, though he has not publicly released any classified materials.
August The Intercept reported that the NSA is "secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a 'Google-like' search engine" called ICREACH. The database,
The Intercept reported, is accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the
Drug Enforcement Administration, and was built to contain more than 850 billion metadata records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and text messages.
2015 February Based on documents obtained from Snowden,
The Intercept reported that the
NSA and
GCHQ had broken into the internal computer network of
Gemalto and stolen the encryption keys that are used in
SIM cards no later than 2010. , the company is the world's largest manufacturer of SIM cards, making about two billion cards a year. With the keys, the intelligence agencies could eavesdrop on cell phones without the knowledge of mobile phone operators or foreign governments.
March The New Zealand Herald, in partnership with
The Intercept, revealed that the New Zealand government used XKeyscore to spy on candidates for the position of
World Trade Organization director general and also members of the
Solomon Islands government.
April In January 2015, the
DEA revealed that it had been collecting metadata records for all telephone calls made by Americans to 116 countries linked to drug trafficking. The DEA's program was separate from the telephony metadata programs run by the NSA. In April,
USA Today reported that the DEA's data collection program began in 1992 and included all telephone calls between the United States and from Canada and Mexico. Current and former DEA officials described the program as the precursor of the NSA's similar programs. The DEA said its program was suspended in September 2013, after a review of the NSA's programs and that it was "ultimately terminated."
2016 January •
NSA documents show the
US and
UK spied on
Israeli military drones and fighter jets.
August • A group called
The Shadow Brokers says it infiltrated NSA's
Equation Group and teases files including some named in documents leaked by
Edward Snowden. Among the products affected by the leaked material was
Cisco PIX and ASA VPN boxes. ==Reaction==