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(Updated: June 28, 2016) Last week, the German weekly Der Spiegel revealed that NSA intercepted the mobile phone of the German chancellor Angela Merkel. Although most details were not known yet, the fact itself caused a severe crisis in the relationship between the United States and Germany. Meanwhile, the original NSA targeting record containing chancellor Merkel's phone number has been published. One of the entries refers to a document about the NSA's SYNAPSE data model , which was disclosed earlier and provides us with a context for the targeting record. Finally, an impression of how the interception could have been conducted is given by a picture of the SCS interception equipment , which is presumably located in the US embassy in Berlin. The NSA targeting record The NSA document mentioning Merkel's phone number was published in the print editions of several German newspapers, but the tabloid paper BILD made a scan for their website: Acoording to Der Spiegel, thi

(Updated: March 30, 2015) In an article by the German magazine Der Spiegel it was said that the NSA probably also eavesdropped on the mobile phone of chancellor Angela Merkel, which is dubbed Merkel-Phone in popular media. Der Spiegel provided little detail, but according to an article in Die Welt , the old cell phone number of Merkel was mentioned in a document provided by Edward Snowden. Der Spiegel presented their evidence to the German government, which led to an investigation by German intelligence and security agencies. Apparently the material proved to be trustworthy and chancellor Merkel expressed her anger in the media and even in a phone call to president Obama. Here we will take a closer look at how the official mobile phone of chancellor Merkel has been secured. UPDATE #1: A new article by Der Spiegel says that a phone number of chancellor Merkel was on an NSA target list since 2002. The document doesn't say what kind of communications were monitored or whether actua

(Updated: January 23, 2017) The day before yesterday, the French paper Le Monde broke with a story saying that NSA is intercepting French telephone communications on a massive scale. This is mainly based upon a graph from the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT program, which shows that during one month, 70,3 million telephone data of French citizens were recorded by the NSA. Here, it will be clarified that the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool only shows numbers of metadata. Also some screenshots will be analysed, showing information about collection related to: - France - The Netherlands - Germany - Spain - - Norway - Afghanistan - Italy - WINDSTOP - Metadata As the Le Monde article, written by Jacques Follorou and Glenn Greenwald, failed to clarify the exact nature of the 70,3 million, it was unclear whether this number was about metadata or also about the content of phone calls. Combined with some sensationalism, this led to headlines like U.S. intercepts French phone calls on a 'massive scale

(Updated: November 26, 2013) Recently, some new NSA powerpoint presentations were published which mention communication intercept facilities with designators like DS-200, DS-200B, DS-300 and DS-800. These don't fit the regular format for such SIGINT Activity Designators (SIGADs), as they normally begin with two letters indicating one of the UKUSA or Five Eyes-countries: US for the United States, UK for the United Kingdom, CA for Canada, AU for Australia and NZ for New Zealand. Initially, the Washington Post wrote that DS referred to NSA's Australian counterpart, the Defence Signals Directorate, probably because of its abbreviation DSD, although this agency was recently renamed to Australian Signals Directorate or ASD. Later the Post corrected this and now says DS refers to the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ. - DS-200B - DS-200 - DS-300 - DS-800 - DS-200B: MUSCULAR But there's another lead. In the third slide of a presentation about SSO Collection Optimiza

On September 5, The Guardian , The New York Times and ProPublica jointly revealed that NSA has a top secret program to break encryption systems used on the internet. This is done by for example inserting vulnerabilities into commercial encryption and IT systems. This program is codenamed BULLRUN, which, according to NSA documents, is not a regular sensitive information compartment , but a "secure COI". COI or CoI stands for Community of Interest , a more common computer security feature by which network assets and/or users are segregated by technological means. This is done through a logical or physical grouping of network devices or users with access to information that should not be available to the general user population of the network. According to the 2011 Classification Manual (pdf) , information residing on secure COIs may not be taken out of the COI or moved to other databases without appropriate approval. ECI = Exceptionally Controlled Information; PTD = Penetra