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(UPDATED: January 20, 2018) Two important NSA programs, PRISM and Upstream, are based upon section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), a law that was originally scheduled to expire today. Now the US Congress has to decide whether to continue or to reform this crucial legal authority . Although PRISM became almost synonymous for NSA's alleged mass surveillance, it's actually, just like the Upstream program, targeted collection aimed at specific foreign targets. Still, many people think that these programs pull in way too many data ( incidental collection ) to be subsequently queried in an illegal way ( backdoor searches ). Here we'll show some of the complexities of these two collection programs and that there are various internal procedures and methods in order to keep collection and analysis as focussed as possible. Slide from the PRISM presentation that for the first time revealed PRISM and Upstream as part of section 702 FAA collection. Until recently, US lawmakers w...

(UPDATED: May 15, 2017) On December 1, Wikileaks published 90 gigabytes of classified documents from the German parliamentary commission that investigates NSA spying and the cooperation between NSA and the German foreign intelligence service BND. The documents include 125 files from BND, 33 from the security service BfV and 72 from the information security agency BSI. It should be noted though that all documents are from the lowest classification level and lots of them are just formal letters, copies of press reports and duplications within e-mail threads. Nonetheless, the files also provide interesting new details, for example about the German classification system, BND's internal structure, the way they handled the Snowden-revelations and the use of XKEYSCORE. - BND classifications - BND organization - XKEYSCORE - - PRISM - BOUNDLESSINFORMANT - Cooperation in Afghanistan - - Intelligence Sharing - Cyber security - Index - These topics will be updated or topics will be a...

(Updated: August 19, 2016) In June last year the Snowden-leaks started with the disclosure of the PRISM -program. For many people it stands for NSA surveillance in general because they often have still no idea what PRISM is actually about. Therefore, this article presents almost everything we know about the PRISM program, combining information from my earlier postings and from other media and government sources. It shows that PRISM is not about bulk or mass surveillance, but for collecting communications of specifically identified foreign targets. NSA also has no "direct access" to the servers of companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Google - it's actually a unit of the FBI that picks up data related to specific identifiers. In total, ca. 227 million internet communications are collected under the PRISM program each year, contributing to reports about counter-intelligence, terrorism and weapons proliferation. Anually, NSA analysts write more than 20.000 PRISM-based repor...