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Showing posts from March, 2015

New Zealand and XKEYSCORE: not much evidence for mass surveillance

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Since March 5, The New Zealand Herald and the website The Intercept published a number of stories based on top secret documents regarding New Zealand. These stories followed last year's claims by Edward Snowden saying that the New Zealand signals intelligence agency GCSB is involved in indiscriminate and illegal mass surveillance of ordinary citizens. Here we will take a close look at the original documentes that accompanied these reportings and put them in a broader context in order to see whether they support these claims or not. Attention will also be paid to the notorious XKEYSCORE system. - GCSB satellite collection - XKEYSCORE - GCSB cable access - Conclusion The listening station at Waihopai (SIGAD: NZC-333) in New Zealand after activists deflated one of the kevlar radomes in April 2008 (Source: GCSB presentation - Click to enlarge)   GCSB satellite collection In the first story from March 5, it was claimed that New Zealand's signals intelligence agency GCSB cond

US military and intelligence computer networks

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(Updated: November 18, 2016) From the Snowden revelations we learned not only about NSA data collection projects, but also about many software tools that are used to analyze and search those data. These programs run on secure computer networks, isolated from the public internet. Here we will provide an overview of these networks that are used by the US military and US intelligence agencies. Besides computer networks, they also use a number of dedicated telephone networks, but gradually these are transferred from traditional circuit-switched networks to Voice over IP (VoIP). This makes it possible to have only one IP packet-switched network for both computer and phone services. It seems that for example NSA's NSTS phone system is now fully IP-based. An old NSTS telephone and a KVM-switch which enables switching between physically separated networks, in this case two Unclassified (green labels), one Secret (red label) and one Top Secret/SCI (orange and yellow label) network (Natio