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(Updated: July 24, 2014) The location that best represents Top Level Telecommunications in every sense of the word is probably Air Force One , the aircraft that carries the president of the United States. As unbelievable as it sounds, the telephone sets used aboard this plane dated back to the 1980s and so they were finally replaced by new ones in August 2012. Here we will take a look at this new telephone equipment, which is now used by president Obama when he travels by air. The new phones In a range of pictures showing president Barack Obama using a telephone aboard Air Force One, we can see that the new phones consist of a handset in a customized cradle. In the conference room they have a rubber foot so they can be placed on the table without sliding away: President Obama using one of the new phones aboard Air Force One (Photo: AP - October 24, 2012) The phone sets to be used by the president in his office room and the conference room have a brown/goldish color that matches the wo...

(Updated: August 18, 2016) Three days ago, on July 9, 2014, Glenn Greenwald published an article which he earlier announced as being the grand finale of the Snowden-revelations. It would demonstrate that NSA is also spying on ordinary American citizens, something that would clearly be illegal. The report is titled " Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On " and it tells the story of Faisal Gill, Asim Ghafoor, Hooshang Amirahmadi, Agha Saeed and Nihad Awad whose e-mail addresses were found in an NSA file from the Snowden-trove. Although the article confusingly mentions both FBI and NSA, many people and media got the impression that this was the long-awaited major NSA abuse scandal. But as we will show here, the document that was published contains no evidence of any involvement of the NSA in this particular case. Everything indicates that it was actually an FBI operation, so it seems not justified to have NSA mentioned in the article. The FISA sp...

(Updated: December 7, 2014) Three days ago, on July 5, 2014, The Washington Post published some of the most important stories from the Snowden-leaks so far. It revealed that Snowden did had access to the content of data collected under FISA and FAA authority - a fact that had been kept secret until now. I'll come back on that main story later. Here we will take a look at a remarkable detail from two slides that were also disclosed in the Post's article. The classification marking of these slides contains the codeword UMBRA, which was generally considered to be abolished in 1999, but now seems to be still in use. After going through several options, my conclusion is that UMBRA is most likely the codename of a so-called unpublished SCI control system. "Target Package" prepared by the National Security Agency prior to the capture of Abu Hamza in January 2011 (click to enlarge) These slides are from a 2011 powerpoint presentation which details the plan to capture al-Qae...

During the past year, a number of slides from a 2002 NSA presentation titled " National Security Agency: Overview Briefing " were disclosed as part of the Snowden-leaks. This presentation as a whole would have been a great comprehensive overview of the structure and the mission of NSA at the start of this millennium, but until now only six slides were made public, widely scattered over a period of almost a year and media from 3 continents, almost as to prevent people getting to see the whole picture. All slides from this presentation can be recognized by their rather overloaded blue background, combining the seals of NSA and CSS, a globe, numerous ones and zeros representing digital communications, and a fancy photoshopped lens flare. In a number of slides, the font type of the classification marking looks different, which could indicate that the presentation was altered and/or re-used several times. This slide was published by Brasilian media in July 2013. A somewhat disto...