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During the 2010s, international media reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies'
global surveillance Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders. Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edw ...
of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex- NSA contractor
Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. Born in 1983 in Elizabeth ...
. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets through the year. These media reports disclosed several secret treaties signed by members of the UKUSA community in their efforts to implement global surveillance. For example, ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'' revealed how the German Federal Intelligence Service (; BND) transfers "massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA", while Swedish Television revealed the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) provided the NSA with data from its cable collection, under a secret agreement signed in 1954 for bilateral cooperation on surveillance. Other security and intelligence agencies involved in the practice of
global surveillance Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders. Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edw ...
include those in Australia ( ASD), Britain (
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primar ...
), Canada ( CSE), Denmark ( PET), France ( DGSE), Germany ( BND), Italy ( AISE), the Netherlands ( AIVD), Norway ( NIS), Spain ( CNI), Switzerland ( NDB), Singapore ( SID) as well as Israel ( ISNU), which receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens from the NSA. On June 14, 2013, United States
prosecutor A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the adversarial system, which is adopted in common law, or inquisitorial system, which is adopted in Civil law (legal system), civil law. The prosecution is the ...
s charged Edward Snowden with
espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering, as a subfield of the intelligence field, is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information ( intelligence). A person who commits espionage on a mission-specific contract is called an ...
and theft of government property. In late July 2013, he was granted a one-year temporary asylum by the Russian government, contributing to a deterioration of Russia–United States relations. Toward the end of October 2013, British prime minister
David Cameron David William Donald Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton (born 9 October 1966) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016. Until 2015, he led the first coalition government in the UK s ...
warned ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' not to publish any more leaks, or it will receive a DA-Notice. In November 2013, a criminal investigation of the disclosure was undertaken by Britain's Metropolitan Police Service. In December 2013, ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' editor
Alan Rusbridger Alan Charles Rusbridger (born 29 December 1953) is a British journalist and editor of ''Prospect (magazine), Prospect'' magazine. He was formerly editor-in-chief of ''The Guardian'' and then principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Rusbridger ...
said: "We have published I think 26 documents so far out of the 58,000 we've seen." The extent to which the media reports responsibly informed the public is disputed. In January 2014, Obama said that "the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has often shed more heat than light"Transcript Of President Obama's Speech On NSA Reforms
NPR January 17, 2014
and critics such as Sean Wilentz have noted that many of the Snowden documents do not concern domestic surveillance. Sean Wilentz (January 19, 2014)
Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?
''
The New Republic ''The New Republic'' (often abbreviated as ''TNR'') is an American magazine focused on domestic politics, news, culture, and the arts from a left-wing perspective. It publishes ten print magazines a year and a daily online platform. ''The New Y ...
''
The US & British Defense establishment weigh the strategic harm in the period following the disclosures more heavily than their civic public benefit. In its first assessment of these disclosures,
the Pentagon The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The building was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As ...
concluded that Snowden committed the biggest "theft" of U.S. secrets in the history of the United States. Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, described Snowden's disclosure as the "most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever".


Background

Snowden obtained the documents while working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States. The initial simultaneous publication in June 2013 by ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' and ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' continued throughout 2013. A small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' (United States), the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (), branded as CBC/Radio-Canada, is the Canadian Public broadcasting, public broadcaster for both radio and television. It is a Crown corporation that serves as the national public broadcaster, with its E ...
, the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is Australia’s principal public service broadcaster. It is funded primarily by grants from the federal government and is administered by a government-appointed board of directors. The ABC is ...
, ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'' (Germany), '' O Globo'' (Brazil), ''
Le Monde (; ) is a mass media in France, French daily afternoon list of newspapers in France, newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average print circulation, circulation of 480,000 copies per issue in 2022, including ...
'' (France), '' L'espresso'' (Italy), ''
NRC Handelsblad ''NRC'', previously called ' (), is a daily morning newspaper published in the Netherlands by Mediahuis NRC. It is widely regarded as a newspaper of record in the country. History was first published on 1 October 1970 after a merger of the Amst ...
'' (the Netherlands), ''
Dagbladet () is one of Norway's largest newspapers and is published in the Tabloid (newspaper format), tabloid format. It has 1,400,000 daily readers on mobile, web and paper. Traditionally it was considered the main liberal newspaper of Norway, with a ...
'' (Norway), '' El País'' (Spain), and
Sveriges Television Sveriges Television AB ("Sweden's Television aktiebolag, Stock Company"), shortened to SVT (), is the Sweden, Swedish national public broadcasting, public television broadcaster, funded by a public service tax on personal income set by the Riksd ...
(Sweden). Barton Gellman, a
Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prizes () are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York City for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters". They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fo ...
–winning journalist who led ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
''s coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows: The disclosure revealed specific details of the NSA's close cooperation with U.S. federal agencies such as the
Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...
(FBI) and the
Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...
(CIA), in addition to the agency's previously undisclosed financial payments to numerous commercial partners and telecommunications companies, as well as its previously undisclosed relationships with international partners such as Britain, France, Germany, and its secret treaties with foreign governments that were recently established for sharing intercepted data of each other's citizens. The disclosures were made public over the course of several months since June 2013, by the press in several nations from the trove leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, who obtained the trove while working for Booz Allen Hamilton. George Brandis, the
Attorney-General of Australia The attorney-general of Australia (AG), also known as the Commonwealth attorney-general, is the minister of state and chief law officer of the Commonwealth of Australia charged with overseeing federal legal affairs and public security as the ...
, asserted that Snowden's disclosure is the "most serious setback for Western intelligence since the
Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
."


Global surveillance

, global surveillance programs include: The NSA was also getting data directly from telecommunications companies code-named Artifice (Verizon), Lithium (AT&T), Serenade, SteelKnight, and X. The real identities of the companies behind these code names were not included in the Snowden document dump because they were protected as Exceptionally Controlled Information which prevents wide circulation even to those (like Snowden) who otherwise have the necessary security clearance.


Disclosures

Although the exact size of Snowden's disclosure remains unknown, the following estimates have been put up by various government officials: * At least 15,000 Australian intelligence files, according to Australian officials * At least 58,000 British intelligence files, according to British officials * About 1.7 million U.S. intelligence files, according to U.S. Department of Defense talking points As a contractor of the NSA, Snowden was granted access to U.S. government documents along with top secret documents of several allied governments, via the exclusive Five Eyes network. Snowden claims that he currently does not physically possess any of these documents, having surrendered all copies to journalists he met in
Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...
. According to his lawyer, Snowden has pledged not to release any documents while in Russia, leaving the responsibility for further disclosures solely to journalists. As of 2014, the following news outlets have accessed some of the documents provided by Snowden:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is Australia’s principal public service broadcaster. It is funded primarily by grants from the federal government and is administered by a government-appointed board of directors. The ABC is ...
,
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (), branded as CBC/Radio-Canada, is the Canadian Public broadcasting, public broadcaster for both radio and television. It is a Crown corporation that serves as the national public broadcaster, with its E ...
,
Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation. It is state-owned enterprise, publicly owned but, unlike the BBC, it receives no public funding and is funded en ...
, ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'', '' El País'', '' El Mundo'', '' L'espresso'', ''
Le Monde (; ) is a mass media in France, French daily afternoon list of newspapers in France, newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average print circulation, circulation of 480,000 copies per issue in 2022, including ...
'', NBC, ''
NRC Handelsblad ''NRC'', previously called ' (), is a daily morning newspaper published in the Netherlands by Mediahuis NRC. It is widely regarded as a newspaper of record in the country. History was first published on 1 October 1970 after a merger of the Amst ...
'', ''
Dagbladet () is one of Norway's largest newspapers and is published in the Tabloid (newspaper format), tabloid format. It has 1,400,000 daily readers on mobile, web and paper. Traditionally it was considered the main liberal newspaper of Norway, with a ...
'', '' O Globo'', ''
South China Morning Post The ''South China Morning Post'' (''SCMP''), with its Sunday edition, the ''Sunday Morning Post'', is a Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper owned by Alibaba Group. Founded in 1903 by Tse Tsan-tai and Alfred Cunningham, it has remaine ...
'', ''
Süddeutsche Zeitung The ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' (; ), published in Munich, Bavaria, is one of the largest and most influential daily newspapers in Germany. The tone of ''SZ'' is mainly described as centre-left, liberal, social-liberal, progressive-liberal, and ...
'',
Sveriges Television Sveriges Television AB ("Sweden's Television aktiebolag, Stock Company"), shortened to SVT (), is the Sweden, Swedish national public broadcasting, public television broadcaster, funded by a public service tax on personal income set by the Riksd ...
, ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'', ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'', and ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
''.


Historical context

In the 1970s, NSA analyst Perry Fellwock (under the pseudonym "Winslow Peck") revealed the existence of the UKUSA Agreement, which forms the basis of the ECHELON network, whose existence was revealed in 1988 by Lockheed employee Margaret Newsham. Months before the
September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...
and during its aftermath, further details of the
global surveillance Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders. Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edw ...
apparatus were provided by various individuals such as the former MI5 official David Shayler and the journalist James Bamford, who were followed by: * NSA employees William Binney and Thomas Andrews Drake, who revealed that the NSA is rapidly expanding its surveillance * GCHQ employee Katharine Gun, who revealed a plot to bug UN delegates shortly before the
Iraq War The Iraq War (), also referred to as the Second Gulf War, was a prolonged conflict in Iraq lasting from 2003 to 2011. It began with 2003 invasion of Iraq, the invasion by a Multi-National Force – Iraq, United States-led coalition, which ...
* British Cabinet Minister Clare Short, who revealed in 2004 that the UK had spied on UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan Kofi Atta Annan (8 April 193818 August 2018) was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founder a ...
* Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm, who triggered the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy after revealing that the Bush Administration had spied on U.S. citizens without court approval. Russell Tice, who was dismissed from his job a space systems specialist at the NSA, was subpoenaed before a grand jury to testify about the NSA's domestice surveillance program. * Journalist Leslie Cauley of ''
USA Today ''USA Today'' (often stylized in all caps) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth in 1980 and launched on September 14, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headq ...
'', who revealed in 2006 that the NSA is keeping a massive database of Americans' phone calls *
AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...
employee Mark Klein, who revealed in 2006 the existence of Room 641A of the NSA * Activists
Julian Assange Julian Paul Assange ( ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of News leak, leaks from Chels ...
and
Chelsea Manning Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage ...
, who revealed in 2011 the existence of the mass surveillance industry * Journalist Michael Hastings, who revealed in 2012 that protestors of the Occupy Wall Street movement were kept under surveillance In the aftermath of Snowden's revelations,
The Pentagon The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The building was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As ...
concluded that Snowden committed the biggest theft of U.S. secrets in the history of the United States. In Australia, the coalition government described the leaks as the most damaging blow dealt to Australian intelligence in history. Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, described Snowden's disclosure as the "most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever".


Timeline of disclosures

In April 2012, NSA contractor
Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. Born in 1983 in Elizabeth ...
began downloading documents.Mark Hosenball (August 15, 2013)
Snowden downloaded NSA secrets while working for Dell, sources say
''
Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide writing in 16 languages. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency ...
''
That year, Snowden had made his first contact with journalist Glenn Greenwald, then employed by ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'', and he contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in January 2013. Peter Maass (August 18, 2013)
"How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets"
''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
''


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 Epilepsy is a group of Non-communicable disease, non-communicable Neurological disorder, neurological disorders characterized by a tendency for recurrent, unprovoked Seizure, seizures. A seizure is a sudden burst of abnormal electrical activit ...
. He traveled from
Hawaii Hawaii ( ; ) is an island U.S. state, state of the United States, in the Pacific Ocean about southwest of the U.S. mainland. One of the two Non-contiguous United States, non-contiguous U.S. states (along with Alaska), it is the only sta ...
to
Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...
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 ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'', Janine Gibson, held several meetings in New York City, she decided that Greenwald, Poitras and the ''Guardian''s 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 ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' 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. According to ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...
'', the Verizon order is part of a controversial data program, which seeks to stockpile records on all calls made in the U.S., but does not collect information directly from
T-Mobile US T-Mobile US, Inc. is an American wireless network operator headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. Its majority shareholder and namesake is the German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom. T-Mobile is the second largest wireless carrie ...
and Verizon Wireless, in part because of their foreign ownership ties. 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 ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' and ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
''. ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'' revealed NSA spying on multiple diplomatic missions of the
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...
and the
United Nations Headquarters The headquarters of the United Nations (UN) is on of grounds in the Turtle Bay, Manhattan, Turtle Bay neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It borders First Avenue (Manhattan), First Avenue to the west, 42nd Street (Manhattan), 42nd ...
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 The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a public university, public research university in Sha Tin, New Territories, Hong Kong. Established in 1963 as a federation of three university college, collegesChung Chi College, New Asia Coll ...
and
Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (THU) is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Constructio ...
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 Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...
is kept for thirty days. Data collected by the
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primar ...
under Tempora is shared with the
National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...
in the United States. From 2001 to 2011, the NSA collected vast amounts of metadata records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans via
Stellar Wind A stellar wind is a flow of gas ejected from the stellar atmosphere, upper atmosphere of a star. It is distinguished from the bipolar outflows characteristic of young stars by being less collimated, although stellar winds are not generally spheri ...
, 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 or phone numbers in order 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 a 30-day period ending in March 2013. Out of all 97 billion sets of information, about 3 billion
data set A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more table (database), database tables, where every column (database), column of a table represents a particular Variable (computer sci ...
s 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 The Federal Intelligence Service (, ; BND) is the foreign intelligence agency of Germany, directly subordinate to the Federal Chancellery of Germany, Chancellor's Office. The Headquarters of the Federal Intelligence Service, BND headquarters is ...
(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.


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.EUA expandem o aparato de vigilância continuamente
'' O Globo'', July 6, 2013. Retrieved July 8, 2013.
Among the numerous allied facilities contributing to XKeyscore are four installations in Australia and one in New Zealand: * Pine Gap near
Alice Springs Alice Springs () is a town in the Northern Territory, Australia; it is the third-largest settlement after Darwin, Northern Territory, Darwin and Palmerston, Northern Territory, Palmerston. The name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William ...
, Australia, which is partly operated by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...
(CIA) * The Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, Australia, is operated by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) * The Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station near
Geraldton Geraldton (Wajarri language, Wajarri: ''Jambinu'', Wilunyu language, Wilunyu: ''Jambinbirri'') is a coastal city in the Mid West (Western Australia), Mid West region of Western Australia, north of the state capital, Perth. As of the , Geraldt ...
, Australia, is operated by the ASD * HMAS Harman outside
Canberra Canberra ( ; ) is the capital city of Australia. Founded following the Federation of Australia, federation of the colonies of Australia as the seat of government for the new nation, it is Australia's list of cities in Australia, largest in ...
, Australia, is operated by the ASD * Waihopai Station near Blenheim, New Zealand, is operated by New Zealand's
Government Communications Security Bureau The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) () is the public service, public-service department of New Zealand charged with promoting New Zealand's national security by collecting and analysing information of an intelligence nature. Th ...
(GCSB) '' O Globo'' released an NSA document titled " Primary FORNSAT Collection Operations", which revealed the specific locations and codenames of the FORNSAT intercept stations in 2002. According to Edward Snowden, the NSA has established secret intelligence partnerships with many Western governments. The Foreign Affairs Directorate (FAD) of the NSA is responsible for these partnerships, which, according to Snowden, are organized such that foreign governments can "insulate their political leaders" from public outrage in the event that these
global surveillance Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders. Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edw ...
partnerships are leaked. In an interview published by ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'', 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.'Prolific Partner': German Intelligence Used NSA Spy Program
''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
''. Retrieved July 21, 2013.
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. Every day, massive amounts of metadata records are collected by the BND and transferred to the NSA via the Bad Aibling Station near
Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...
, Germany. In December 2012 alone, the BND handed over 500 million metadata records to the NSA. 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". Under a section of a separate document leaked by Snowden titled "Success Stories", the NSA acknowledged the efforts of the German government to expand the BND's international data sharing with partners: In addition, the German government was well aware of the PRISM surveillance program long before Edward Snowden made details public. According to Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert, there are two separate PRISM programs – one is used by the NSA and the other is used by
NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ; , OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental organization, intergovernmental Transnationalism, transnational military alliance of 32 Member states of NATO, member s ...
forces in
Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...
. The two programs are "not identical". ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' revealed further details of the NSA's XKeyscore tool, which allows government analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals without prior authorization. Greenwald, Glenn (July 31, 2013
"XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'"
''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
''. Retrieved August 1, 2013.
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 prior to 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 A team sport is a type of sport where the fundamental nature of the game or sport requires the participation of multiple individuals working together as a team, and it is inherently impossible or highly impractical to execute the sport as a s ...
". The CIA's National Counterterrorism Center is allowed to examine federal government files for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect U.S. citizens of wrongdoing. Previously the NTC was barred to do so, unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation. 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 (; ) is a mass media in France, French daily afternoon list of newspapers in France, newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average print circulation, circulation of 480,000 copies per issue in 2022, including ...
'' 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 The ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' (; ), published in Munich, Bavaria, is one of the largest and most influential daily newspapers in Germany. The tone of ''SZ'' is mainly described as centre-left, liberal, social-liberal, progressive-liberal, and ...
'' (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 communication Fiber-optic communication is a form of optical communication for transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of infrared or visible light through an optical fiber. The light is a form of carrier wave that is modul ...
s. The telecom operators are: * Verizon Business (codenamed "Dacron") * BT (codenamed "Remedy") * Vodafone Cable (codenamed "Gerontic") * Global Crossing (codenamed "Pinnage") * Level 3 (codenamed "Little") * Viatel (codenamed "Vitreous") * Interoute (codenamed "Streetcar") Each of them were assigned a particular area of the international fiber-optic network for which they were individually responsible. The following networks have been infiltrated by GCHQ: TAT-14 (EU-UK-US), Atlantic Crossing 1 (EU-UK-US), Circe South (France-UK), Circe North (Netherlands-UK), Flag Atlantic-1, Flag Europa-Asia, SEA-ME-WE 3 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe), SEA-ME-WE 4 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe), Solas (Ireland-UK), UK-France 3, UK-Netherlands 14, ULYSSES (EU-UK),
Yellow Yellow is the color between green and orange on the spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a dominant wavelength of roughly 575585 nm. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, used in painting or color printing. In t ...
(UK-US) and Pan European Crossing (EU-UK). Telecommunication companies who participated were "forced" to do so and had "no choice in the matter". Some of the companies were subsequently paid by GCHQ for their participation in the infiltration of the cables. According to the SZ, GCHQ has access to the majority of internet and telephone communications flowing throughout Europe, can listen to phone calls, read emails and text messages, see which websites internet users from all around the world are visiting. It can also retain and analyse nearly the entire European internet traffic. GCHQ is collecting all data transmitted to and from the United Kingdom and Northern Europe via the undersea fibre optic telecommunications cable SEA-ME-WE 3. The Security and Intelligence Division (SID) of Singapore co-operates with Australia in accessing and sharing communications carried by the SEA-ME-WE-3 cable. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is also in a partnership with British, American and Singaporean intelligence agencies to tap undersea fibre optic telecommunications cables that link Asia, the Middle East and Europe and carry much of Australia's international phone and internet traffic. 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. The NSA is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, but also searching the contents of vast amounts of e-mail and text communications into and out of the country by Americans who mention information about foreigners under surveillance. 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 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. A letter drafted by the Obama administration specifically to inform Congress of the government's mass collection of Americans' telephone communications data was withheld from lawmakers by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee in the months before a key vote affecting the future of the program. 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's 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 Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data (Network packet, packets) being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep ...
) "black boxes" at various
internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...
s, 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 In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the inf ...
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 The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a group of separate US federal government, U.S. federal government intelligence agencies and subordinate organizations that work to conduct Intelligence assessment, intelligence activities which ...
, 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 Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIF ...
network. In the United States, the NSA uses the analysis of phone call 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
smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...
s began exceeding those of
feature phone Feature may refer to: Computing * Feature recognition, could be a hole, pocket, or notch * Feature (computer vision), could be an edge, corner or blob * Feature (machine learning), in statistics: individual measurable properties of the phenome ...
s, 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. An internal NSA report from 2010 stated that the spread of the smartphone has been occurring "extremely rapidly"—developments that "certainly complicate traditional target analysis." According to the document, the NSA has set up
task force A task force (TF) is a unit or formation established to work on a single defined task or activity. Originally introduced by the United States Navy, the term has now caught on for general usage and is a standard part of NATO terminology. Many ...
s assigned to several smartphone manufacturers and
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s, including Apple Inc.'s
iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...
and iOS operating system, as well as
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
's Android mobile operating system. Similarly, Britain's
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primar ...
assigned a team to study and crack the
BlackBerry BlackBerry is a discontinued brand of handheld devices and related mobile services, originally developed and maintained by the Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM, later known as BlackBerry Limited) until 2016. The first BlackBerry device ...
. Under the heading "iPhone capability", the document notes that there are smaller NSA programs, known as "scripts", that can perform surveillance on 38 different features of the iOS 3 and iOS 4 operating systems. These include the mapping feature, voicemail and photos, as well as
Google Earth Google Earth is a web mapping, web and computer program created by Google that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satelli ...
, Facebook and Yahoo! Messenger. On September 9, 2013, an internal NSA presentation on iPhone Location Services was published by ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
''. One slide shows scenes from Apple's ''1984''-themed television commercial alongside the words "Who knew in 1984..."; another shows Steve Jobs holding an iPhone, with the text "...that this would be big brother..."; and a third shows happy consumers with their iPhones, completing the question with "...and the zombies would be paying customers?"


October

On October 4, 2013, ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' and ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' 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 U.S. government's first public acknowledgment that it tapped the phones of world leaders was reported on October 28, 2013, by the Wall Street Journal after an internal U.S. government review turned up NSA monitoring of some 35 world leaders.
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primar ...
has tried to keep its mass surveillance program a secret because it feared a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities which could lead to legal challenges against them. ''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 The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (Washington, D.C.), NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president ...
,
State State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...
and
The Pentagon The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The building was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As ...
, 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 Brussels, officially the Brussels-Capital Region, (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) is a Communities, regions and language areas of Belgium#Regions, region of Belgium comprising #Municipalit ...
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 Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...
and
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
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. According to the Spiegel this monitoring goes back to 2002 and ended in the summer of 2013, while ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' reported that Germany has evidence that the NSA's surveillance of Merkel began during
George W. Bush George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who was the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Bush family and the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he i ...
's tenure. After learning from ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'' 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 (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
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 are able to 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 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 (; ) is a mass media in France, French daily afternoon list of newspapers in France, newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average print circulation, circulation of 480,000 copies per issue in 2022, including ...
'' also disclosed new PRISM and Upstream slides (See Page 4, 7 and 8) 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.


November

''The New York Times'' reported that the NSA carries 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 The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a combat support agency within the United States Department of Defense whose primary mission is collecting, analyzing, and distributing geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) to support national se ...
, 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 Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...
. 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 Malware (a portmanteau of ''malicious software'')Tahir, R. (2018)A study on malware and malware detection techniques . ''International Journal of Education and Management Engineering'', ''8''(2), 20. is any software intentionally designed to caus ...
. The NSA gathered documents and
login In computer security, logging in (or logging on, signing in, or signing on) is the process by which an individual gains access to a computer system or program by identifying and authenticating themselves. Typically, user credential ...
credentials belonging to the enemy country, along with knowledge of the ally's capabilities for attacking computers. According to the British newspaper ''
The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...
'', the British intelligence agency GCHQ maintains a listening post on the roof of the British Embassy in Berlin that is capable of intercepting mobile phone calls, wi-fi data and long-distance communications all over the German capital, including adjacent government buildings such as the Reichstag (seat of the German parliament) and the Chancellery (seat of Germany's head of government) clustered around the
Brandenburg Gate The Brandenburg Gate ( ) is an 18th-century Neoclassical architecture, neoclassical monument in Berlin. One of the best-known landmarks of Germany, it was erected on the site of a former city gate that marked the start of the road from Berlin t ...
. Operating under the code-name "Quantum Insert", GCHQ set up a fake website masquerading as
LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...
, 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 The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC ) is an organization enabling the co-operation of leading oil-producing and oil-dependent countries in order to collectively influence the global oil market and maximize Profit (eco ...
were infiltrated by GCHQ as well as the NSA, which bugged the computers of nine OPEC employees and monitored the General Secretary of OPEC. For more than three years GCHQ has been using an automated monitoring system code-named "Royal Concierge" to infiltrate the reservation systems of at least 350 prestigious hotels in many different parts of the world in order to target, search and analyze reservations to detect diplomats and government officials. 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 Human intelligence is the Intellect, intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex Cognition, cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness. Using their intelligence, humans are able to learning, learn, Concept ...
(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. In November 2013, the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is Australia’s principal public service broadcaster. It is funded primarily by grants from the federal government and is administered by a government-appointed board of directors. The ABC is ...
and ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' revealed that the Australian Signals Directorate (DSD) had attempted to listen to the private phone calls of the president of Indonesia and his wife. The Indonesian foreign minister,
Marty Natalegawa Raden Mohammad Marty Muliana Natalegawa (born 22 March 1963 in Bandung, West Java), is an Indonesian diplomat and was the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Second United Indonesia Cabinet. He served as Indonesia's Permanent Representative ...
, confirmed that he and the president had contacted the ambassador in Canberra. Natalegawa said any tapping of Indonesian politicians' personal phones "violates every single decent and legal instrument I can think of—national in Indonesia, national in Australia, international as well". Other high-ranking Indonesian politicians targeted by the DSD include: *
Boediono Boediono (Perfected Spelling System, EYD: Budiono, pronounced ; born 25 February 1943) is an Indonesian politician and economist who served as the 11th Vice President of Indonesia, vice president of Indonesia from 2009 to 2014. He became vice pr ...
(Vice President) *
Jusuf Kalla Muhammad Jusuf Kalla (; born 15 May 1942), commonly referred to by his initials JK, is an Indonesian politician and businessman who served as the 10th and 12th vice president of Indonesia, the only vice president in Indonesian history to serve tw ...
(Former Vice President) * Dino Patti Djalal (Ambassador to the United States) * Andi Mallarangeng (Government spokesperson) * Hatta Rajasa (State Secretary) * Sri Mulyani Indrawati (Former Finance Minister and current managing director of the
World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and Grant (money), grants to the governments of Least developed countries, low- and Developing country, middle-income countries for the purposes of economic development ...
) * Widodo Adi Sutjipto (Former Commander-in-Chief of the military) * Sofyan Djalil (Senior government advisor) Carrying the title " 3G impact and update", a classified presentation leaked by Snowden revealed the attempts of the ASD/DSD to keep up to pace with the rollout of 3G technology in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia. The ASD/DSD motto placed at the bottom of each page reads: "Reveal their secrets—protect our own." Under a secret deal approved by British intelligence officials, the NSA has been storing and analyzing the internet and email records of British citizens since 2007. The NSA also proposed in 2005 a procedure for spying on the citizens of the UK and other Five-Eyes nations alliance, even where the partner government has explicitly denied the U.S. permission to do so. Under the proposal, partner countries must neither be informed about this particular type of surveillance, nor the procedure of doing so. 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 The law of the United States comprises many levels of Codification (law), codified and uncodified forms of law, of which the supreme law is the nation's Constitution of the United States, Constitution, which prescribes the foundation of the ...
has not kept up with the needs of the NSA to conduct mass surveillance in the "golden age" of
signals intelligence Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is the act and field of intelligence-gathering by interception of ''signals'', whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly u ...
, 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". On November 23, 2013, the Dutch newspaper ''
NRC Handelsblad ''NRC'', previously called ' (), is a daily morning newspaper published in the Netherlands by Mediahuis NRC. It is widely regarded as a newspaper of record in the country. History was first published on 1 October 1970 after a merger of the Amst ...
'' reported that the Netherlands was targeted by U.S. intelligence agencies in the immediate aftermath of
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
. This period of surveillance lasted from 1946 to 1968, and also included the interception of the communications of other European countries including Belgium, France, West Germany and Norway. 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.


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 include "bulk, unselected, unminimized metadata" 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 f metadata of Australian nationalsis 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 to other types of data, however 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 ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' 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 The Kola Peninsula (; ) is a peninsula in the extreme northwest of Russia, and one of the largest peninsulas of Europe. Constituting the bulk of the territory of Murmansk Oblast, it lies almost completely inside the Arctic Circle and is border ...
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 *1963 – Extension of the agreement for coverage of foreign instrumentation signals intelligence (FISINT) *1970 – Extension of the agreement for coverage of electronic intelligence (ELINT) *1994 – Extension of the agreement for coverage of communications intelligence (COMINT) The NSA considers the NIS to be one of its most reliable partners. Both agencies also cooperate to crack the encryption systems of mutual targets. According to the NSA, Norway has made no objections to its requests from the NIS. On December 5,
Sveriges Television Sveriges Television AB ("Sweden's Television aktiebolag, Stock Company"), shortened to SVT (), is the Sweden, Swedish national public broadcasting, public television broadcaster, funded by a public service tax on personal income set by the Riksd ...
reported the National Defense Radio Establishment (FRA) has been conducting a clandestine surveillance operation in Sweden, targeting the internal politics of Russia. The operation was conducted on behalf of the NSA, receiving data handed over to it by the FRA. The Swedish-American surveillance operation also targeted Russian energy interests as well as the
Baltic states The Baltic states or the Baltic countries is a geopolitical term encompassing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. All three countries are members of NATO, the European Union, the Eurozone, and the OECD. The three sovereign states on the eastern co ...
. 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. * Since January 2013, a counterterrorism analyst of the NSA has been stationed in the Swedish capital of
Stockholm Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately ...
* The NSA, GCHQ and the FRA signed an agreement in 2004 that allows the FRA to directly collaborate with the NSA without having to consult GCHQ. About five years later, the
Riksdag The Riksdag ( , ; also or , ) is the parliament and the parliamentary sovereignty, supreme decision-making body of the Kingdom of Sweden. Since 1971, the Riksdag has been a unicameral parliament with 349 members (), elected proportional rep ...
passed a controversial legislative change, briefly allowing the FRA to monitor both wireless and cable bound signals passing the Swedish border without a court order, 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. In Italy the Special Collection Service of the NSA maintains two separate surveillance posts in Rome and
Milan Milan ( , , ; ) is a city in northern Italy, regional capital of Lombardy, the largest city in Italy by urban area and the List of cities in Italy, second-most-populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of nea ...
. 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 drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...
s. * Under the codename "Hemlock", which refers to mission "Highlands", the NSA gains access to the embassy's communications through physical "implants". Due to concerns that terrorist or criminal networks may be secretly communicating via computer games, the NSA, GCHQ, CIA, and FBI have been conducting surveillance and scooping up data from the networks of many online games, including
massively multiplayer online role-playing game A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a video game that combines aspects of a role-playing video game and a massively multiplayer online game. As in role-playing games (RPGs), the player assumes the role of a Player charac ...
s (MMORPGs) such as
World of Warcraft ''World of Warcraft'' (''WoW'') is a 2004 massively multiplayer online role-playing (MMORPG) video game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment for Windows and Mac OS X. Set in the '' Warcraft'' fantasy universe, ''World of War ...
, as well as
virtual world A virtual world (also called a virtual space or spaces) is a Computer simulation, computer-simulated environment which may be populated by many simultaneous users who can create a personal Avatar (computing), avatar and independently explore th ...
s such as
Second Life ''Second Life'' is a multiplayer virtual world that allows people to create an Avatar (computing), avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multi-user online environment. Developed for person ...
, and the
Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand that consists of four main home video game console lines, as well as application software, applications (games), the streaming media, streaming service Xbox Cloud Gaming, and online services such as the Xbox networ ...
gaming console. 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. Leon granted the request for a preliminary injunction that blocks the collection of phone data for two private plaintiffs (Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer, and Charles Strange, father of a cryptologist killed in Afghanistan when his helicopter was shot down in 2011) 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 NSA did not belong to telephone users, but to the telephone companies. He further ruled that when 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. A catalog of high-tech gadgets and software developed by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) was leaked by the German news magazine ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
''. Dating from 2008, the catalog revealed the existence of special gadgets modified to capture computer
screenshot A screenshot (also known as screen capture or screen grab) is an analog or digital image that shows the contents of a computer display. A screenshot is created by a (film) camera shooting the screen or the operating system An operating sys ...
s and
USB flash drive A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and u ...
s secretly fitted with radio transmitters to broadcast stolen data over the airwaves, and fake base stations intended to intercept mobile phone signals, as well as many other secret devices and software implants listed here: File:NSA SPARROW II.jpg, SPARROW II – Mobile device that functions as a WLAN collection system File:NSA FIREWALK.jpg, FIREWALK – Hardware implant for collection of
Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in ...
network traffic File:NSA GINSU.jpg, GINSU – Software that extends application persistence for the CNE (Computer Network Exploitation) implant KONGUR File:NSA IRATEMONK.jpg, IRATEMONK – Replaces
master boot record A master boot record (MBR) is a type of boot sector in the first block of disk partitioning, partitioned computer mass storage devices like fixed disks or removable drives intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems and beyond. The concept ...
s (MBRs) of various hard disk manufacturers File:NSA SWAP.jpg, SWAP – Exploits
motherboard A motherboard, also called a mainboard, a system board, a logic board, and informally a mobo (see #Nomenclature, "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It ho ...
BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...
before the
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
loads File:NSA WISTFULTOLL.jpg, WISTFULTOLL – Software implant that exploits
Windows Management Instrumentation Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a set of extensions to the Windows Driver Model that provides an operating system interface through which instrumented components provide information and notification. WMI is Microsoft's implementatio ...
(WMI) to transfer data File:NSA HOWLERMONKEY.jpg, HOWLERMONKEY – Short to medium range
radio frequency Radio frequency (RF) is the oscillation rate of an alternating electric current or voltage or of a magnetic, electric or electromagnetic field or mechanical system in the frequency range from around to around . This is roughly between the u ...
(RF)
transceiver In radio communication, a transceiver is an electronic device which is a combination of a radio ''trans''mitter and a re''ceiver'', hence the name. It can both transmit and receive radio waves using an antenna, for communication purposes. The ...
File:NSA NIGHTSTAND.jpg, NIGHTSTAND – Mobile device that introduces NSA software to computers up to away via
wireless LAN A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network that links two or more devices using wireless communication to form a local area network (LAN) within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, campus, or office building ...
File:NSA COTTONMOUTH-I.jpg, COTTONMOUTH-I –
USB flash drive A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and u ...
implant File:NSA COTTONMOUTH-II.jpg, COTTONMOUTH-II – USB implant File:NSA COTTONMOUTH-III.jpg, COTTONMOUTH-III – USB implant File:NSA JUNIORMINT.jpg, JUNIORMINT – Digital core packaged into a
printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB), also called printed wiring board (PWB), is a Lamination, laminated sandwich structure of electrical conduction, conductive and Insulator (electricity), insulating layers, each with a pattern of traces, planes ...
(PCB) and a flip chip File:NSA MAESTRO-II.jpg, MAESTRO-II – Miniaturized digital core packaged into a
multi-chip module A multi-chip module (MCM) is generically an electronic assembly (such as a package with a number of conductor terminals or Lead (electronics), "pins") where multiple integrated circuits (ICs or "chips"), semiconductor Die (integrated circuit), d ...
(MCM) File:NSA TRINITY.jpg, TRINITY – Miniaturized digital core packaged into a
multi-chip module A multi-chip module (MCM) is generically an electronic assembly (such as a package with a number of conductor terminals or Lead (electronics), "pins") where multiple integrated circuits (ICs or "chips"), semiconductor Die (integrated circuit), d ...
(MCM) File:NSA SOMBERKNAVE.jpg, SOMBERKNAVE – Software implant for
Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...
that provides covert
Internet access Internet access is a facility or service that provides connectivity for a computer, a computer network, or other network device to the Internet, and for individuals or organizations to access or use applications such as email and the World Wide ...
for the NSA's targets File:NSA SURLYSPAWN.jpg, SURLYSPAWN – Device for keystroke logging NSA RAGEMASTER.jpg, RAGEMASTER – Hardware implant concealed in a computer's VGA cable to capture screenshots and video
File:NSA IRONCHEF.jpg, IRONCHEF – Software implant that functions as a permanent
BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...
system File:NSA DEITYBOUNCE.jpg, DEITYBOUNCE – Software implant for insertion into Dell PowerEdge servers File:NSA JETPLOW.jpg, JETPLOW – Installs a backdoor targeting Cisco PIX and ASA firewalls File:NSA HALLUXWATER.jpg, HALLUXWATER – Installs a backdoor targeting
Huawei Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ("Huawei" sometimes stylized as "HUAWEI"; ; zh, c=华为, p= ) is a Chinese multinational corporationtechnology company in Longgang, Shenzhen, Longgang, Shenzhen, Guangdong. Its main product lines include teleco ...
's Eudemon firewalls File:NSA FEEDTROUGH.jpg, FEEDTROUGH – Installs a backdoor targeting numerous
Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including Router (computing), routers, Network switch, switches, network management so ...
firewalls File:NSA GOURMETTROUGH.jpg, GOURMETTROUGH – Installs a backdoor targeting numerous
Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including Router (computing), routers, Network switch, switches, network management so ...
firewalls File:NSA SOUFFLETROUGH.jpg, SOUFFLETROUGH –
BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...
implant for Juniper SSG300 and SSG 500 series firewalls
File:NSA LOUDAUTO.jpg, LOUDAUTO – Covert listening device File:NSA NIGHTWATCH.jpg, NIGHTWATCH – Device for reconstruction of signals belonging to target systems File:NSA CTX4000.jpg, CTX4000 – Portable continuous-wave radar (CRW) unit to illuminate a target system for Dropmire collection File:NSA PHOTOANGLO.jpg, PHOTOANGLO – Successor to the CTX4000, jointly developed by the NSA and GCHQ File:NSA TAWDRYYARD.jpg, TAWDRYYARD – Device that functions as a
radio frequency Radio frequency (RF) is the oscillation rate of an alternating electric current or voltage or of a magnetic, electric or electromagnetic field or mechanical system in the frequency range from around to around . This is roughly between the u ...
(RF)
retroreflector A retroreflector (sometimes called a retroflector or cataphote) is a device or surface that reflects light or other radiation back to its source with minimum scattering. This works at a wide range of angle of incidence (optics), angle of incidenc ...
File:NSA PICASSO.jpg, PICASSO – Modified
GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...
handset File:NSA GENESIS.jpg, GENESIS – Modified Motorola SLVR L9 handset File:NSA CROSSBEAM.jpg, CROSSBEAM –
GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...
module for commercial mobile phones File:NSA CANDYGRAM.jpg, CANDYGRAM – Mimics the
GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...
cell tower of targeted networks File:NSA DROPOUTJEEP.jpg, DROPOUTJEEP – Software implant for the iOS operating system of the
iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...
File:NSA GOPHERSET.jpg, GOPHERSET – Software implant for
GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...
subscriber identity module (SIM) cards that pulls out address books, SMS ( Short Message Service) text messages, and call log information File:NSA MONKEYCALENDAR.jpg, MONKEYCALENDAR – Software implant for GSM subscriber identity module (SIM) cards that pulls out geolocation information File:NSA TOTECHASER.jpg, TOTECHASER – Windows CE implant that targets the Thuraya handset File:NSA TOTEGHOSTLY.jpg, TOTEGHOSTLY 2.0 – Software implant for
Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Designed to be the portable equivalent of the Windows desktop OS in the emerging Mobile device, mobile/port ...
capable of retrieving SMS ( Short Message Service) text messages, Voicemail and contact lists, as well as turning on built-in microphones and cameras
The Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division of the NSA intercepted the shipping deliveries of computers and laptops in order to install spyware and physical implants on electronic gadgets. This was done in close cooperation with the FBI and the CIA. NSA officials responded to the Spiegel reports with a statement, which said: "Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the front lines of enabling NSA to defend the nation and its allies. AO'swork is centred on computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence collection." In a separate disclosure unrelated to Snowden, the French Trésor public, which runs a certificate authority, was found to have issued fake certificates impersonating
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
in order to facilitate spying on French government employees via man-in-the-middle attacks.


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 cages, which are designed to prevent
electromagnetic radiation In physics, electromagnetic radiation (EMR) is a self-propagating wave of the electromagnetic field that carries momentum and radiant energy through space. It encompasses a broad spectrum, classified by frequency or its inverse, wavelength ...
from entering or leaving. Currently, the NSA is close to producing basic building blocks that will allow the agency to gain "complete quantum control on two
semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...
qubits". 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. According to ''The New York Times'', the NSA is monitoring approximately 100,000 computers worldwide with spy software named Quantum. Quantum enables the NSA to conduct surveillance on those computers on the one hand, and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks on the other hand. Among the targets are the Chinese and Russian military, but also trade institutions within the European Union. The NYT also reported that the NSA can access and alter computers which are not connected with the internet by a secret technology in use by the NSA since 2008. The prerequisite is the physical insertion of the radio frequency hardware by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user. The technology relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target. The technology can also transmit malware back to the infected computer.
Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation. It is state-owned enterprise, publicly owned but, unlike the BBC, it receives no public funding and is funded en ...
and ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' revealed the existence of Dishfire, a massive
database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...
of the NSA that collects hundreds of millions of text messages on a daily basis. 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 Geopositioning is the process of determining or estimating the geographic position of an object or a person. Geopositioning yields a set of Geographic coordinate system, geographic coordinates (such as latitude and longitude) in a given map datum ...
data of more than 76,000 text messages and other travel information * Over 110,000 names, gathered from electronic
business card Business cards are card stock, cards bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid. A business card typically includes the giver's name, types of co ...
s * Over 800,000
financial transaction A financial transaction is an Contract, agreement, or communication, between a buyer and seller to exchange goods, Service (economics), services, or assets for payment. Any transaction involves a change in the status of the finances of two or mo ...
s that are either gathered from text-to-text payments or by linking credit cards to phone users * Details of 1.6 million border crossings based on the interception of network roaming alerts * Over 5 million missed call alerts * About 200 million text messages from around the world The database is supplemented with an analytical tool known as the Prefer program, which processes SMS messages to extract other types of information including contacts from missed call alerts. 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 ProPublica (), legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in New York City. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time reporters, and the resulting stories are distributed to ne ...
, the NSA and GCHQ have begun working together to collect and store data from dozens of
smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...
application software Application software is any computer program that is intended for end-user use not operating, administering or programming the computer. An application (app, application program, software application) is any program that can be categorized as ...
by 2007 at the latest. A 2008 GCHQ report, leaked by Snowden asserts that "anyone using
Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...
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 Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...
, 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 Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...
,
LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...
, 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 Geopositioning is the process of determining or estimating the geographic position of an object or a person. Geopositioning yields a set of Geographic coordinate system, geographic coordinates (such as latitude and longitude) in a given map datum ...
), age, gender, ZIP code, marital status, income,
ethnicity An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people with shared attributes, which they Collective consciousness, collectively believe to have, and long-term endogamy. Ethnicities share attributes like language, culture, common sets of ancestry, ...
,
sexual orientation Sexual orientation is an enduring personal pattern of romantic attraction or sexual attraction (or a combination of these) to persons of the opposite sex or gender, the same sex or gender, or to both sexes or more than one gender. Patterns ar ...
, 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 Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...
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 Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...
services at a major Canadian airport. Passengers who exited the airport terminal continued to be tracked as they showed up at other
Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...
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 users in order to 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.


February

According to research by ''
Süddeutsche Zeitung The ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' (; ), published in Munich, Bavaria, is one of the largest and most influential daily newspapers in Germany. The tone of ''SZ'' is mainly described as centre-left, liberal, social-liberal, progressive-liberal, and ...
'' and TV network NDR the mobile phone of former German chancellor
Gerhard Schröder Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder (; born 7 April 1944) is a German former politician and Lobbying, lobbyist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. From 1999 to 2004, he was also the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (S ...
was monitored from 2002 onward, reportedly because of his government's opposition to military intervention in Iraq. The source of the latest information is a document leaked by
Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. Born in 1983 in Elizabeth ...
. The document, containing information about the National Sigint Requirement List (NSRL), had previously been interpreted as referring only to Angela Merkel's mobile. However, ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' and NDR claim to have confirmation from NSA insiders that the surveillance authorisation pertains not to the individual, but the political post – which in 2002 was still held by Schröder. According to research by the two media outlets, Schröder was placed as number 388 on the list, which contains the names of persons and institutions to be put under surveillance by the NSA. GCHQ launched a cyber-attack on the activist network "
Anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...
", 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 detail the flawed methods which 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 WikiLeaks () is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by ...
and other activist groups were targeted for government surveillance and criminal prosecution. In particular, the
IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...
es 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 Julian Paul Assange ( ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of News leak, leaks from Chels ...
, 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 exactly the same way as any other states." ''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 In neuroanatomy, the optic nerve, also known as the second cranial nerve, cranial nerve II, or simply CN II, is a paired cranial nerve that transmits visual system, visual information from the retina to the brain. In humans, the optic nerve i ...
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 which 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 A turbine ( or ) (from the Greek , ''tyrbē'', or Latin ''turbo'', meaning vortex) is a rotary mechanical device that extracts energy from a fluid flow and converts it into useful work. The work produced can be used for generating electrical ...
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 to 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 relies 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 as 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 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 relating 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 (; ) is a mass media in France, French daily afternoon list of newspapers in France, newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average print circulation, circulation of 480,000 copies per issue in 2022, including ...
'' 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 Technologies Co., Ltd. ("Huawei" sometimes stylized as "HUAWEI"; ; zh, c=华为, p= ) is a Chinese multinational corporationtechnology company in Longgang, Shenzhen, Longgang, Shenzhen, Guangdong. Its main product lines include teleco ...
. Huawei is a leading manufacturer of smartphones, tablets, mobile phone infrastructure, and WLAN routers and installs fiber optic cable. According to ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'' this "kind of technology ... is decisive in the NSA's battle for data supremacy." The NSA, in an operation named "Shotgiant", was able to access Huawei's email archive and the source code for Huawei's communications products. The US government has had longstanding concerns that Huawei may not be independent of the
People's Liberation Army The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's Republic of China (PRC). It consists of four Military branch, services—People's Liberation Army Ground Force, Ground Force, People's ...
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 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. ''The Intercept'' published a document of an NSA employee discussing how to build a database of IP addresses, webmail, and Facebook accounts associated with system administrators so that the NSA can gain access to the networks and systems they administer. At the end of March 2014, ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'' 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. The NSA was granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the authority for blanket surveillance of Germany, its people and institutions, regardless whether those affected are suspected of having committed an offense or not, without an individualized court order specifying on March 7, 2013. In addition Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel was listed in a surveillance search machine and database named Nymrod along with 121 others foreign leaders. As ''The Intercept'' wrote: "The NSA uses the Nymrod system to 'find information relating to targets that would otherwise be tough to track down,' according to internal NSA documents. Nymrod sifts through secret reports based on intercepted communications as well as full transcripts of faxes, phone calls, and communications collected from computer systems. More than 300 'cites' for Merkel are listed as available in intelligence reports and transcripts for NSA operatives to read."


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 WikiLeaks () is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by ...
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 Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. With an estimated population of more than 52.4 million as of mid-2024, Kenya is the 27th-most-populous country in the world and the 7th most populous in Africa. ...
, the
Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...
,
Mexico Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...
, 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 Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...
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." Through its global surveillance operations the NSA exploits the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications to harvest millions of images. These images are then used by the NSA in sophisticated facial recognition programs to track suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets.


June

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public Limited Company () is a British Multinational company, multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates Service (economic ...
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 equipment in a locked room. In six countries where Vodafone operates, the law requires telecommunication companies to install such access or allows governments to do so. Vodafone did not name these countries in case some governments retaliated by imprisoning their staff. Shami Chakrabarti of
Liberty Liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views. The concept of liberty can vary depending on perspective and context. In the Constitutional ...
said "For governments to access phone calls at the flick of a switch is unprecedented and terrifying. Snowden revealed the internet was already treated as fair game. Bluster that all is well is wearing pretty thin – our analogue laws need a digital overhaul." Vodafone published its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on June 6, 2014. Vodafone group privacy officer Stephen Deadman said "These pipes exist, the direct access model exists. We are making a call to end direct access as a means of government agencies obtaining people's communication data. Without an official warrant, there is no external visibility. If we receive a demand we can push back against the agency. The fact that a government has to issue a piece of paper is an important constraint on how powers are used." Gus Hosein, director of Privacy International said "I never thought the telcos would be so complicit. It's a brave step by Vodafone and hopefully the other telcos will become more brave with disclosure, but what we need is for them to be braver about fighting back against the illegal requests and the laws themselves." Above- top-secret documentation of a covert surveillance program named Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1) (codenamed "CIRCUIT") by
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primar ...
was published by ''
The Register ''The Register'' (often also called El Reg) is a British Technology journalism, technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee (journalist), Mike Magee and John Lettice. The online newspaper's Nameplate_(publishing), masthead Logo, s ...
''. Based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, GCHQ taps into undersea fiber optic cables via secret spy bases near the Strait of Hormuz and Yemen. BT and
Vodafone Vodafone Group Public Limited Company () is a British Multinational company, multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates Service (economic ...
are implicated. 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 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 Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
's intelligence service BND was arrested on suspicion of spying for the
United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
. 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 ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' 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 Executive Order 12333, signed on December 4, 1981 by U.S. president Ronald Reagan, was an executive order intended to extend powers and responsibilities of U.S. intelligence agencies and direct the leaders of U.S. federal agencies to co-operat ...
. 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 The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is a Federal law enforcement in the United States, United States federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Justice tasked with combating illicit Illegal drug trade, drug trafficking a ...
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 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primar ...
had broken into the internal computer network of
Gemalto Gemalto was an international digital security company providing software applications, secure personal devices such as smart cards and tokens, e-wallets and managed services. It was formed in June 2006 by the merger of two companies, Axalto and ...
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 ''The New Zealand Herald'' is a daily newspaper published in Auckland, New Zealand, owned by New Zealand Media and Entertainment, and considered a newspaper of record for New Zealand. It has the largest newspaper circulation in New Zealand, ...
'', in partnership with ''The Intercept'', revealed that the New Zealand government used XKeyscore to spy on candidates for the position of
World Trade Organization The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland that regulates and facilitates international trade. Governments use the organization to establish, revise, and enforce the rules that g ...
director general and also members of the
Solomon Islands Solomon Islands, also known simply as the Solomons,John Prados, ''Islands of Destiny'', Dutton Caliber, 2012, p,20 and passim is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 1000 smaller islands in Melanesia, part of Oceania, t ...
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 ''USA Today'' (often stylized in all caps) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth in 1980 and launched on September 14, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headq ...
'' 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."


September

Snowden provided journalists at ''The Intercept'' with GCHQ documents regarding another secret program " Karma Police", calling itself "the world's biggest" data mining operation, formed to create profiles on every visible Internet user's browsing habits. By 2009 it had stored over 1.1 trillion web browsing sessions, and by 2012 was recording 50 billion sessions per day.


2016


January

* NSA documents show the US and UK spied on
Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...
i military drones and fighter jets.


August

* A group called '' The Shadow Brokers'' says it infiltrated NSA's
Equation Group The Equation Group, also known in China as APT-C-40, is a highly sophisticated Threat (computer)#Threat agents or actors, threat actor suspected of being tied to the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit of the United States National Security Age ...
and teases files including some named in documents leaked by
Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. Born in 1983 in Elizabeth ...
. Among the products affected by the leaked material was Cisco PIX and ASA VPN boxes.


2017

In March 2017,
WikiLeaks WikiLeaks () is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by ...
published more than 8,000 documents on the CIA. The confidential documents, codenamed Vault 7, dated from 2013 to 2016, included details on the CIA's hacking capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars,
smart TV A smart TV, also known as a connected TV (CTV or, rarely, CoTV), is a traditional television set with integrated Internet and interactive Web 2.0 features that allow users to stream music and videos, browse the internet, and view photos. Smart T ...
s,
web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...
s (including
Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...
,
Microsoft Edge Microsoft Edge is a Proprietary Software, proprietary cross-platform software, cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft and based on the Chromium (web browser), Chromium open-source project, superseding Edge Legacy. In Windows 11, Edge ...
,
Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...
, and
Opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...
), and the operating systems of most
smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...
s (including
Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
's iOS and
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
's Android), as well as other
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s such as
Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
,
macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
, and
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
. WikiLeaks did not name the source, but said that the files had "circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive."


2018


January

* January 4, 2018: ''The Intercept'' publishes an article revealing the existence of an NSA program called "Reaper" that allows the agency to target individuals' computers around the world for surveillance and hacking. * January 9, 2018: ''The New York Times'' reports that the U.S. government used a secret program called "Quiet Skies" to monitor U.S. citizens who were not suspected of any crimes, including monitoring their behavior and movements on flights. * January 12, 2018: ''The Washington Post'' reports that the FBI failed to notify U.S. officials that Russian hackers were trying to penetrate their personal Gmail accounts.


March

* March 15, 2018: ''The Intercept'' reports that the U.S. government has been using a secret database to monitor journalists and activists at the U.S.-Mexico border. * March 19, 2018: Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks out, which involves unauthorized access of millions of Facebook users' data by Cambridge Analytica for political purposes.


April

* April 12, 2018: ''The Intercept'' reports that the NSA was targeting cryptocurrency users and tracking their transactions. * April 24, 2018: ''The New York Times'' reports that the Chinese government has been using the surveillance system tool SKYNET to monitor the country's Muslim minority population.


June

* June 13, 2018: ''The Intercept'' reports that the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been using facial recognition technology to scan millions of driver's license photos without people's knowledge or consent.


July

* July 13, 2018: The Justice Department announces that it has indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers for hacking into the Democratic National Committee's computer network during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.


October

* October 4, 2018: ''The Guardian'' publishes an article revealing that a Chinese spy had been working at the U.S. embassy in Beijing for more than a decade and had access to sensitive information. * October 15, 2018: ''The New York Times'' reports that the Chinese government has been using a surveillance app called "Study the Great Nation" to monitor and control its citizens.


December

* December 6, 2018: ''The Washington Post'' reports that the U.S. government has been secretly tracking journalists, activists, and migrant advocates who were covering the migrant caravan at the U.S.- Mexico border.


2019


January

* January 1, 2019: Australia's new encryption law goes into effect, which requires technology companies to provide law enforcement with access to encrypted communications.


March

* March 7, 2019: WikiLeaks releases a trove of documents revealing the CIA's hacking tools and techniques for breaking into smartphones and other devices. * March 25, 2019: ''The Wall Street Journal'' reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) has allegedly stopped collecting phone call and text message data from US citizens, citing 'technical difficulties'.


April

* April 10, 2019: ''The Intercept'' furthers reports that the US government has been secretly monitoring journalists and activists who are part of a migrant caravan in Mexico. * April 18, 2019: ''The Guardian'' reports that the US government has secretly charged WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange Julian Paul Assange ( ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of News leak, leaks from Chels ...
with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.


May

* May 8, 2019:
WhatsApp WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger) is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make vo ...
discovers a security flaw that allows attackers to install spyware on users' phones, prompting the company to urge its 1.5 billion users to update their apps. * May 14, 2019: ''The New York Times'' reports that the US government is using facial recognition technology to scan millions of Americans' driver's license photos without their knowledge or consent.


June

* June 6, 2019: ''The New York Times'' reports that the Chinese government is using facial recognition technology to monitor and track the Chinese Muslim minority population in Xinjiang.


July

* July 17, 2019: The Wall Street Journal reports that the US government continues to be secretly collecting data from the cellphones of US citizens, including their location and relationships with other people.


August

* August 2, 2019: The United Nations' Human Rights Chief calls for a moratorium on the sale and use of facial recognition technology until its implications for privacy and human rights can be properly assessed. * August 13, 2019: ''The New York Times'' reports that the Chinese government is using a new tool called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform to monitor and track the movements of people in
Xinjiang Xinjiang,; , SASM/GNC romanization, SASM/GNC: Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Sinkiang, officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an Autonomous regions of China, autonomous region of the China, People' ...
.


September

* September 12, 2019: ''The Guardian'' reports that the UK government has secretly been developing a new mass surveillance system called 'Crown Marketplace,' which will allow it to track the online activities of millions of people in real-time.


October

* October 2, 2019: The European Court of Justice rules that member states cannot collect phone and internet data on a generalized basis and that any surveillance must be targeted and limited to what is strictly necessary.


December

* December 5, 2019: ''The New York Times'' reports that the Chinese government has detained over one million Muslims in "re-education" camps in Xinjiang, where they are subjected to intense surveillance and monitoring.


2020


2021

* In May 2021, it was reported that Danish Defence Intelligence Service collaborated with NSA to wiretap on fellow EU members and leaders, leading to wide backlash among EU countries and demands for explanation from Danish and American governments.


Reaction


Public perception

The disclosure provided impetus for the creation of
social movement A social movement is either a loosely or carefully organized effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, typically a Social issue, social or Political movement, political one. This may be to carry out a social change, or to re ...
s against mass surveillance, such as Restore the Fourth, and actions like Stop Watching Us and The Day We Fight Back. On the legal front, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...
joined a
coalition A coalition is formed when two or more people or groups temporarily work together to achieve a common goal. The term is most frequently used to denote a formation of power in political, military, or economic spaces. Formation According to ''A G ...
of diverse groups filing suit against the NSA. Several human rights organizations urged the Obama administration not to prosecute, but protect, "
whistleblower Whistleblowing (also whistle-blowing or whistle blowing) is the activity of a person, often an employee, revealing information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe, unethical or ...
Snowden":
Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says that it has more than ten million members a ...
,
Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Headquartered in New York City, the group investigates and reports on issues including War crime, war crimes, crim ...
,
Transparency International Transparency International e.V. (TI) is a German registered association founded in 1993 by former employees of the World Bank. Based in Berlin, its nonprofit and non-governmental purpose is to take action to combat global corruption with civil s ...
, and the
Index on Censorship Index on Censorship is an organisation campaigning for freedom of expression. It produces a quarterly magazine of the same name from London. It is directed by the non-profit-making Writers and Scholars International, Ltd (WSI) in association wit ...
, among others. On the economic front, several consumer surveys registered a drop in online shopping and banking activity as a result of the Snowden revelations. However, it is argued long-term impact among the general population is negligible, as "the general public has still failed to adopt privacy-enhancing tools en masse." A research study that tracked the interest in privacy-related webpages following the incident found that the public's interest reduced quickly, despite continuous discussion by the media about the events.


Reactions of political leaders


United States

Domestically, President
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...
claimed that there is "no spying on Americans", and
White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (Washington, D.C.), NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president ...
Press Secretary Jay Carney asserted that the surveillance programs revealed by Snowden have been authorized by Congress. On the international front, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder stated that "we cannot target even foreign persons overseas without a valid foreign intelligence purpose."


United Kingdom

Prime Minister
David Cameron David William Donald Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton (born 9 October 1966) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016. Until 2015, he led the first coalition government in the UK s ...
warned journalists that "if they don't demonstrate some social responsibility it will be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act."
Deputy Prime Minister A deputy prime minister or vice prime minister is, in some countries, a Minister (government), government minister who can take the position of acting prime minister when the prime minister is temporarily absent. The position is often likened to th ...
Nick Clegg Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg (born 7 January 1967) is a British retired politician and media executive who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015 and as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015. H ...
emphasized that the media should "absolutely defend the principle of secrecy for the intelligence agencies". Foreign Secretary William Hague claimed that "we take great care to balance individual privacy with our duty to safeguard the public and UK national security." Hague defended the Five Eyes alliance and reiterated that the British-U.S. intelligence relationship must not be endangered because it "saved many lives".


Australia

Former Prime Minister
Tony Abbott Anthony John Abbott (; born 4 November 1957) is an Australian former politician who served as the 28th prime minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015. He held office as the leader of the Liberal Party of Australia and was the member of parli ...
stated that "every Australian governmental agency, every Australian official at home and abroad, operates in accordance with the law". Abbott criticized the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is Australia’s principal public service broadcaster. It is funded primarily by grants from the federal government and is administered by a government-appointed board of directors. The ABC is ...
for being unpatriotic due to its reporting on the documents provided by Snowden, whom Abbott described as a "traitor". Foreign Minister Julie Bishop also denounced Snowden as a traitor and accused him of "unprecedented" treachery. Bishop defended the Five Eyes alliance and reiterated that the Australian–U.S. intelligence relationship must not be endangered because it "saves lives".


China

Chinese policymakers became increasingly concerned about the risk of cyberattacks following the disclosures, which demonstrated extensive United States intelligence activities in China. As part of its response, the Communist Party in 2014 formed the Cybersecurity and Information Leading Group.


Germany

In July 2013, Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the surveillance practices of the NSA, and described the United States as "our truest ally throughout the decades". After the NSA's surveillance on Merkel was revealed, however, the Chancellor compared the NSA with the Stasi. According to ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'',
Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
is using the controversy over NSA spying as leverage to enter the exclusive Five Eyes alliance. Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich stated that "the Americans take our data privacy concerns seriously." Testifying before the German Parliament, Friedrich defended the NSA's surveillance, and cited five terrorist plots on German soil that were prevented because of the NSA. However, in April 2014, another German interior minister criticized the United States for failing to provide sufficient assurances to Germany that it had reined in its spying tactics. Thomas de Maiziere, a close ally of Merkel, told ''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'': "U.S. intelligence methods may be justified to a large extent by security needs, but the tactics are excessive and over-the-top."


Sweden

Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt, defended the FRA and described its surveillance practices as a "national necessity". Minister for Defence Karin Enström said that Sweden's intelligence exchange with other countries is "critical for our security" and that "intelligence operations occur within a framework with clear legislation, strict controls and under parliamentary oversight."


Netherlands

Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk apologized for incorrectly claiming that the NSA had collected 1.8 million records of metadata in the Netherlands. Plasterk acknowledged that it was in fact Dutch intelligence services who collected the records and transferred them to the NSA.


Denmark

The Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt has praised the American intelligence agencies, claiming they have prevented terrorist attacks in Denmark, and expressed her personal belief that the Danish people "should be grateful" for the Americans' surveillance. She has later claimed that the Danish authorities have no basis for assuming that American intelligence agencies have performed illegal spying activities toward Denmark or Danish interests.


Intelligence agency reviews

;Germany In July 2013, the German government announced an extensive review of German intelligence services. ;United States In August 2013, the U.S. government announced an extensive review of U.S. intelligence services. ;United Kingdom In October 2013, the British government announced an extensive review of British intelligence services. ;Canada In December 2013, the Canadian government announced an extensive review of Canadian intelligence services.


Criticism and alternative views

In January 2014, U.S. President
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...
said that "the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has often shed more heat than light" and critics such as Sean Wilentz claimed that "the NSA has acted far more responsibly than the claims made by the leakers and publicized by the press." In Wilentz' view "The leakers have gone far beyond justifiably blowing the whistle on abusive programs. In addition to their alarmism about .S.domestic surveillance, many of the Snowden documents released thus far have had nothing whatsoever to do with domestic surveillance." Edward Lucas, former Moscow bureau chief for ''
The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British newspaper published weekly in printed magazine format and daily on Electronic publishing, digital platforms. It publishes stories on topics that include economics, business, geopolitics, technology and culture. M ...
'', agreed, asserting that "Snowden's revelations neatly and suspiciously fits the interests of one country: Russia" and citing Masha Gessen's statement that "The Russian propaganda machine has not gotten this much mileage out of a US citizen since Angela Davis's murder trial in 1971." Bob Cesca objected to ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' failing to redact the name of an NSA employee and the specific location where an al Qaeda group was being targeted in a series of slides the paper made publicly available. Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov argued that Snowden's revelations had had negative consequences for internet freedom in Russia, as Russian authorities increased their own surveillance and regulation on the pretext of protecting the privacy of Russian users. Snowden's name was invoked by Russian legislators who supported measures forcing platforms such as
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
,
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
,
Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
,
Gmail Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...
, and
YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
to locate their servers on Russian soil or install SORM black boxes on their servers so that Russian authorities could control them. Soldatov also contended that as a result of the disclosures, international support for having national governments take over the powers of the organizations involved in coordinating the Internet's global architectures had grown, which could lead to a Balkanization of the Internet that restricted free access to information. The Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation issued in October 2013, by
ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several dat ...
and other organizations warned against "Internet fragmentation at a national level" and expressed "strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations". In late 2014,
Freedom House Freedom House is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. It is best known for political advocacy surrounding issues of democracy, Freedom (political), political freedom, and human rights. Freedom House was founded in October 1941, wi ...
said " me states are using the revelations of widespread surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as an excuse to augment their own monitoring capabilities, frequently with little or no oversight, and often aimed at the political opposition and human rights activists."Tightening the Net: Governments Expand Online Controls
''
Freedom House Freedom House is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. It is best known for political advocacy surrounding issues of democracy, Freedom (political), political freedom, and human rights. Freedom House was founded in October 1941, wi ...
'' Freedom on the Net 2014


Gallery


Comparison with other leaks


See also

* Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act * Global surveillance whistleblowers * Harris Corporation * PositiveID * Vulkan files leak


References


External links

*
Global Surveillance
. An annotated and categorized "overview of the revelations following the leaks by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. There are also some links to comments and followups". By Oslo University Library. *
NSA Spying Scandal
''
Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
''
Six months of revelations on NSA by the Washington Post's Kennedy Elliott and Terri Rupar on December 23, 2013
* A collection of documents relating to surveillance. ** Part 2 of the above. ** Part 3 of the above. * Documents relating to the surveillance against Dilma Rousseff and Enrique Peña Nieto
The NSA Archive by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
– All documents released since June 5, 2013—both by the media and the U.S. government—are housed in this database established and operated by the ACLU. *
ACLU article "Introducing the ACLU's NSA Documents Database" by the ACLU's Emily Weinrebe on April 3, 2014
on the above NSA Archive established and operated by the
American Civil Liberties Union The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit civil rights organization founded in 1920. ACLU affiliates are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The budget of the ACLU in 2024 was $383 million. T ...
(ACLU).
NSA Primary Sources
– A List of all leaks and links to media articles related to the disclosures based on the material of Edward Snowden sorted by Date, Document and Media outlet established and operated by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...
.
Snowden disclosures
at the
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
. {{DEFAULTSORT:Global surveillance disclosures (2010s) Cover-ups Edward Snowden Global surveillance News leaks Surveillance scandals 2010s in international relations 2010s in politics 2010s scandals Articles containing video clips