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(Updated: September 29, 2014) After a range of articles about how NSA intercepts foreign communications, we now take a look at the equipment that NSA uses to secure their own telecommunications, more specific those of its director. We can do this because last December, the CBS program 60 Minutes offered some unprecedented insights into the NSA headquarters. Of course very limited, but still interesting for those with a sharp eye. Perhaps the most revealing was that for the first time ever it was shown how the office of the director of NSA looks like: The office of NSA director Alexander, December 2013 (click to enlarge) The office of the director is at a corner on the eighth floor of the OPS 2B building, which is the wider and lower one of the two black mirrored glass structures of the NSA headquarters at Fort George G. Meade . Contrary to what many people would probably expect, the director's office is far from high tech. We see a rather traditional interior with a classic woode

(Updated: August 9, 2017) On February 4, the Dutch government admitted that it was not NSA that collected 1,8 million metadata from phone calls of Dutch citizens, but actually their own military intelligence service MIVD. They gathered those data from foreign communications and subsequently shared them with partner agencies like NSA. Just like everyone else, the Dutch interior minister was mislead by how Glenn Greenwald erroneously interpreted the data shown in screenshots from the NSA tool BOUNDLESSINFORMANT . This let him misinform the Dutch public and parliament too, and only after being faced with a lawsuit, he finally disclosed the truth. Here's the full story. How it started The first charts from the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool were published by the German magazine Der Spiegel on July 29, 2013. Next to a bigger chart about Germany was a smaller one about the Netherlands, but this was completely overseen by Dutch media. Only after the French paper Le Monde came with a big story a

(Updated: August 9, 2017) Today, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad finally published the complete BOUNDLESSINFORMANT screenshot that shows data related to the Netherlands. This came after a surprising revelation by the Dutch government that the 1,8 million metadata shown in that screenshot were not from Dutch citizens and intercepted by NSA, but actually from a legitimate collection against foreign targets by the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD which was passed on to the Americans. Here, I will analyse the chart and compare it with similar charts about various other countries that were published earlier. More about the background, which caused some severe political problems for the Dutch interior minister, can be read here ! The BOUNDLESSINFORMANT screenshot for the Netherlands (picture by NRC Handelsblad - click to enlarge) The first thing that catches the eye is that the screenshot is shown here on paper, together with another sheet with an orange bar bearing a classifi

(UPDATED: March 30, 2014) One of the biggest scandals among the revelations about NSA spying activities, was that NSA was monitoring a mobile phone used by the current German chancellor Angela Merkel (although not her secure government cell phone, but the unsecured one provided by her political party). But on February 4th, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the regional television channel NDR came with a somewhat different interpretation of this story. Both media presented the document which proofs the monitoring to NSA insiders, who explained that it shows that since 2002 NSA was targeting the German chancellor, and not specifically Angela Merkel, who became chancellor just by the end of 2005. In 2002, this office was held by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder , who was chancellor from October 1998 to November 2005, leading an unprecedented coalition with the Green Party for two terms. Citing a number of US government sources and NSA insiders, both media say that Schröder&

(Updated: February 9, 2014) On January 30, the Canadian television channel CBC broke a story written by Greg Weston, Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher, saying that the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which is Canada's equivalent of NSA, used airport WiFi to track Canadian travellers - something which was claimed to be almost certainly illegal. This story was apperently based upon an internal CSEC presentation (pdf) from May 2012 which is titled "IP Profiling Analytics & Mission Impacts": The CSEC presentation about "IP Profiling Analytics & Mission Impacts" (click for the full presentation in PDF) However, as is often the case with many of the stories based on the Snowden-documents, it seems that the original CSEC presentation was incorrectly interpreted and presented by Canadian television. The presentation was analysed by a reader of this weblog, who wants to stay anonymous, but kindly allowed me to publish his interpretation,