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(Updated: July 28, 2013) Yesterday, German media wrote about an official letter from the NSA, which was sent to the German government to clarify some misconceptions about PRISM. This because German media and politics were heavily confused after it became clear that there's more than one program named PRISM. The NSA letter explains what the PRISM data collection program is about and then confirms that this program is different from a more common military web tool called "Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management" (PRISM). Surprisingly, the NSA also reveals that there's even a third program called PRISM. In this case the name stands for "Portal for Real-time Information Sharing and Management" and it's apparently an internal NSA information sharing program. It was unknown until now, probably because it's used in the NSA's highly sensitive Information Assurance Directorate (IAD). Initially: two different PRISMs Almost im...

(Updated: November 30, 2014) Over the last month, the publication of various slides of a powerpoint presentation about the top secret NSA collection program PRISM caused almost worldwide media attention. Less known is that a number of new slides about other NSA collection programs were published on July 6 by the Brazilian newspaper O Globo . These and a few other slides were also shown on Brazilian televion, combined with an interview with Guardian-columnist Glenn Greenwald , who lives in Rio de Janeiro. Screenshots of some of the slides shown on Brazilian television became available on Flickr (see Links and Sources). On July 21, the German magazine Der Spiegel published some extra details about the XKEYSCORE program. - FAIRVIEW-slides - FORNSAT-slide - PRISM-slides - XKEYSCORE-slides - FAIRVIEW-slides Brazilian television and the O Globo website presented a whole new series of four slides from what seems to be a presentation about the FAIRVIEW program or maybe the broader "...

(Updated: January 21, 2016) Last Saturday, June 29, the Washington Post unexpectedly disclosed four new slides from the powerpoint presentation about the PRISM data collection program. This disclosure came as a surprise, because earlier, Guardian-journalist Glenn Greenwald said that no more slides would be published because they contain very specific technical NSA means for collection, for which The Guardian would probably be prosecuted. That The Washington Post now disclosed them, is even more surprising, not only because it's an American paper, but also because it's said that Edward Snowden initially went to The Post asking to publish all 41 slides of the PRISM presentation. But The Washington Post refused to do so and therefore Snowden gave the scoop to The Guardian, which published the first four slides. It's not clear who exactly released the four new slides, whether it was Snowden himself or editors of The Washington Post, and what the reason was for doing it. Allth...

(Updated with an infographic on June 30, 2013) Since The Guardian first published about the PRISM data collection program on June 6, there have been new disclosures of top secret documents almost every day, resulting in some fierce protests against apparently illegal wiretapping by the NSA and GCHQ. However, it remains unclear what PRISM actually is or does, as The Guardian didn't provide any new details or disclosed more than 5 of the 41 presentation slides about the program. This makes it hard to determine whether PRISM really is the illegal or at least embarrassing program which most people now think it is. Especially, because it could even be the hardly secret Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management (PRISM), which is a web-based tool to manage information requests widely used by the US military. Here we will take a closer look at this program and try to determine whether this could be the same as the PRISM revealed by The Guardian. > The la...

The communications security and intelligence branch is notorious for its abbreviations, acronyms, nicknames and codewords, and recently we learned a number of new NSA codewords from many classified documents which Edward Snowden handed over to The Guardian. Here we provide two listings, one of abbreviations and acronyms, and one of nicknames and codewords, to get somewhat more grip on these things: - Abbreviations and Acronyms - Nicknames and Codewords Listings like this can never be complete, and therefore expect new entries to be added gradually, as well as updates of existing entries.

(Updated: June 10, 2013) Yesterday, Thursday June 6, The Washington Post and The Guardian came with a breaking news story about a Top Secret NSA program called PRISM , which reportedly collects data directly from the servers of nine major internet companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype and Apple. Many of these firms have already denied that the government has access to their networks. Today both president Obama and director of National Intelligence James Clapper said there is no gathering of information about US citizens or of any person located within the United States. > The latest information: What is known about NSA's PRISM program The Guardian claimed to have obtained 41 slides of an NSA presentation about the PRISM collection program, and showed some of them on its website. But some strange looking details caused a number of people, especially on Twitter, think the slides might be fake. Here we take a more close look at these slides, which, if genuine, give...