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(Updated: November 26, 2014) Most of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden are from the American signals intelligence agency NSA , but there are also quite a number from their British counterpart GCHQ . Documents from both countries are classified as TOP SECRET and often have additional markings to further restrict their dissemination. Where on American documents we see markings like COMINT (Communications Intelligence) and NOFORN (No Foreign Nationals), the British have the mysterious term STRAP followed by a number. Information about American classification and dissemination markings can rather easily be found on the internet (see also The US classification system on this weblog), but there are hardly any details about the British classification system. But luckily, there's one source available which describes STRAP and other British classification practices in detail: the extensive Defence Manual of Security from 2001. Chapter 17 (page 1131-1135) of Volume 1 gives an overview...

(Updated: September 16, 2017) On December 11, the Swedish public television channel SVT published a range of new NSA-documents from the Snowden-collection. One is a text which for the first time proves that intelligence agencies of nine European countries are 3rd Party partners of NSA. These countries are: France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Earlier, these nations were identified as forming the 14-Eyes group, for which we now also have a real name: SIGINT Seniors Europe or SSEUR. (Click for a bigger version) Unfortunately only this very small excerpt was published, so we don't know what the rest of the document is about. But as small as it is, it reveals some interesting new things, which will be explained in this article: - The 3rd Party status of a number of European countries - The existance of a group called SIGINT Seniors Europe - More clarity about the mysterious 14-Eyes + UPDATE! 3rd Party countries This is probably the firs...

(Updated: January 3, 2014) A previous article on this website showed that the charts in the NSA's BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool are not so easy to interpret as it may seem. Screenshots from this tool were published by a number of European newspapers saying that they are proving that NSA is intercepting phonecalls from these countries. This article will show and examine a new image which literally provides context to these screenshots. In a less known follow-up article from November 4 on the website of the spanish paper El Mundo there are four slides from a powerpoint presentation about BOUNDLESSINFORMANT. Three of the slides were published earlier , but the fourth one was never shown before. This new slide shows a screenshot of an Internet Explorer browser window with the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool in it: For the first time, this screenshot reveals what the actual BOUNDLESSINFORMANT interface looks like. It shows that the bar charts and the details below it, as published by the newspaper...

(Updated: August 29, 2017) On November 23, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published a new slide from the Snowden documents. The slide is from a Top Secret NSA management presentation from 2012 and shows the agency's worldwide information collection capabilities. As the slide is titled "Driver 1: Worldwide SIGINT/Defense Cryptologic Platform" there must be more slides with "Drivers", but unfortunately these were not published. This article will take a close look at the map and tries to provide an explanation of the various interception locations of what is NSA's new ECHELON network for the internet age: Click the map for a bigger version - it opens in a new tab or window, so you can keep the map stand-by while reading this article The slide shows five types of data collection, called "Classes of Accesses". These correspond to the organizational channels through which NSA gathers it's intelligence: - 3rd PARTY/LIAISON - Intelligence shar...