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(Updated: December 18, 2013) Last June, the still on-going Snowden-leaks started with the unveiling of PRISM , an NSA program which collects information about foreign targets from American internet companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple. Since then, no new information about PRISM was published, but recently some new details could be found. These show that PRISM is part of another NSA program, codenamed BLARNEY , and that US-984XN is not a single designator for PRISM, but stands for multiple designators, one for each of the internet companies . New slides On September 8, the Brazilian television news magazine Fantástico aired a report about the NSA trying to access the network of the Brazilian oil company Petrobras. In the background of this report, a number of hitherto unseen NSA slides were shown. One of the slides shows details about the BLARNEY program, which has the SIGAD, or SIGINT Activity Designator US-984 and the PDDG, or Producer Designator Digraph AX....

(Updated: November 28, 2018) Top level telecommunications often involve information that has to be kept secret. To ensure that, governments have systems to protect sensitive information by classifying it, which is best known from document markings like "Top Secret". Here we'll explain the classification system of the United States, which is far more complex than most people think, also because it's one of the world's biggest secrecy systems. In 2012 almost 5 million(!) people in the US had a clearance for access to classified information, * a number that was brought back to 4,2 million by 2015. * The deeper parts of this classification system are classified, but some new details and codewords have been revealed in documents from the recent Snowden-leaks. Classification markings All documents that contain classified information, whether digital or hard copy, have to be marked with the appropriate markings. These are shown in the classification or banner line, whi...

(Updated: December 7, 2015) On September 1, the popular Brazilian television news magazine Fantástico reported about an NSA operation for wiretapping the communications of the presidents of Mexico and Brazil. Fantástico is part of the Globo network, which already disclosed various top secret NSA presentations last July. Now, the Brazilian magazine showed some new top secret NSA documents, like a powerpoint presentation about the eavesdropping operation, which were all among the thousands of documents which Edward Snowden gave to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald in June. Fantástico also published the slides on their website, but as that's only in portuguese, we show these slides too, because they give a nice graphical insight in how the NSA intercepts foreign communications. The Fantástico news magazine started showing a cover sheet of a presentation which bears the logo of the SIGDEV Strategy and Governance division of the NSA , where SIGDEV stands for SIGINT Development. H...