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(Updated: January 6, 2017) Most of the Snowden-revelations are about spying on the internet, but NSA and GCHQ are also conducting the more traditional collection of telephone communications that go through satellite links. What needs to be done before phone calls can be collected, can be learned from two highly detailed technical reports from the GCHQ listening station near Bude in the UK. These reports were published on August 31 last year by the German magazine Der Spiegel and the website The Intercept as part of a story about how Turkey is both a partner and a target for US intelligence. Here we will analyse what's in these reports, which give an interesting impression of the techniques used to transmit telephone communications over satellite links. Satellite dishes at the GCHQ intercept station near Bude, Cornwall, UK Officially, such technical reports are called "informal reports", as opposed to the "serialized reports" that contain finished intelligence...

(Updated: January 16, 2015) This is part III about the German parliamentary committee which investigates NSA spying activities and the cooperation between NSA and the German foreign intelligence service BND . The hearings of a number of BND employees which are summarized below, provided many interesting details about BND cable and satellite collection and how these data are selected and filtered and how privacy rights are implemented. This was especially of concern for the cooperation between NSA and BND in the Joint SIGINT Activity (JSA). The witnesses also stated that contrary to the initial press report, under the joint operation Eikonal not a single German communication was passed on to NSA. These summaries are based upon transcripts of a live blog, kept by volunteers of the German digital civil rights website Netzpolitik.org , who attended the hearings. The employees of the BND are designated by initials, not of their real names, but of those of the cover names they are using wh...