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Showing posts from January, 2014

Slides about NSA's Upstream collection

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(Updated: August 16, 2015) In July and September of last year, the Brazilian weekly television magazine Fantástico broadcasted news reports about NSA operations, while showing a series of slides from an unpublished NSA powerpoint presentation in the background. The slides seem to be about NSA's corporate partners for the "collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past" - which became known as " Upstream collection ", a term mentioned in one of the PRISM-slides. The corporate partnerships are one of three ways NSA is intercepting the world's main internet cables: - Cooperation with telecommunication companies - Cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies - Unilateral cable tapping operations On twitter, Glenn Greenwald once said that these slides would also be published and explained separately, but so far this hasn't happened - that's why it's done here. UPDATE: Almost two years after these slides were s

NSA's organizational designations

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(Updated: December 29, 2018) After providing lists of NSA-related codenames , abbreviations and SIGADs , we now publish a list of the designations of the numerous divisions and units of the NSA organization itself. Unlike other intelligence agencies such as CIA or DIA, NSA never disclosed its internal organizational structure. The following overview has been reconstructed based upon information which over the years became available from various sources, including many documents from the Snowden-leaks. This list only gives the alphanumeric designations, the official name and, if available, the logo of NSA branches. For a description of what the most important divisions do, click the links in the list or visit the websites mentioned under Links and Sources. In 2013, the following numbers of people worked for NSA/CSS: - NSA : ca. 21,500 civilian personnel and ca. 13,500 military personnel - CSS (tactical SIGINT collection units): ca. 12,000 military personnel > Update: In 2016, a m