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(Updated: February 27, 2015) Last Thursday, February 19, the website The Intercept broke a big story about how NSA and GCHQ hacked the security company Gemalto in order to acquire large numbers of keys used in the SIM cards of mobile phones. The story has quite some background information about how these keys are used and how NSA and GCHQ conducted this operation. But as we have often seen with revelations based upon the Snowden-documents, media once again came with headlines like " Sim card database hack gave US and UK spies access to billions of cellphones ", which is so exaggerated that it is almost a scandal in itself. Instead, analysing The Intercept's article and the original documents leads to the conclusion that the goals of this operation were most likely limited to tactical military operations - something that was completely ignored in most press reports. Also there is no evidence that Gemalto was more involved in this than other SIM card suppliers. To what ext...

(UPDATED July 5, 2017) During his very first interview , former NSA contractor Edward Snowden pretended that he, sitting behind his desk " certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, or even the President if I had a personal e-mail ". Right from the beginning, intelligence experts doubted that individual NSA analysts would have such far-reaching powers. By looking at the legal authorities and procedures that regulate NSA's collection efforts, it becomes clear that it is highly unlikely that Snowden, or other analysts could have done that in a legitimate way. Targeting US citizens under FISA authority The National Security Agency (NSA) collects foreign signals intelligence outside the US, but in a few special cases, it is also allowed to collect data about US citizens or to collect data inside the US. This is shown in the following decision tree: Diagram with a decision tree showing the various legal authorities under ...