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(Updated: June 14, 2018) In recently published charts from NSA's BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool about France, Spain, Norway and Afghanistan we see the mysterious term DRTBOX. For example, the screenshot for Norway presents 33 million telephony metadata, which were collected from mobile phone networks by a facility designated US-987F and processed/analysed by DRTBOX: (Click for a bigger version) Unlike what it seems, DRTBOX is not a codename, but part of a wireless surveillance system, made by a company generally known as DRT. This article will show that this company manufactures a range of sophisticated surveillance and tracking devices, used by US law enforcement and signals intelligence agencies. - Digital Receiver Technology, Inc. - Law enforcement - - Signals intelligence - Foreign usage - - . - . - . - . - .- Digital Receiver Technology, Inc. DRT is the abbreviation of Digital Receiver Technology, Inc. This company was formerly known as Utica Systems, Inc. and founded in 1980...

(Updated: January 23, 2017) Over the last months, a number of European newspapers published screenshots from an NSA tool codenamed BOUNDLESSINFORMANT , which were said to show the number of data that NSA collected from those countries. Most recently, a dispute about the numbers mentioned in a screenshot about Norway urged Snowden-journalist Glenn Greenwald to publish a similar screenshot about Afghanistan. But as this article will show, Greenwald's interpretation of the latter was wrong, which also raises new questions about how to make sense out of the screenshots about other countries. Norway vs Afghanistan On November 19, the website of the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet published a BOUNDLESSINFORMANT screenshot which, according to the paper, showed that NSA apparently monitored 33 million Norwegian phone calls (although actually, the NSA tool only presents metadata). The report by Dagbladet was almost immediatly corrected by the Norwegian military intelligence agency Etteretnings...

(Updated: January 22, 2014) On November 2, The Guardian published a lenghty article about the Snowden-leaks, which said that besides the close intelligence-sharing group of the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New-Zealand, known as 5-Eyes, there are also groups called 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes. According to The Guardian, the first consists of the 5-Eyes countries plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway and the latter adding another five European nations. This caused some embarrassment, as especially France and The Netherlands were heavily opposed to NSA's eavesdropping operations. For almost everyone the existance of these 'Eyes' came as a surprise, but as this article will show, there are also 3-, 4-, 6-, 7-, 8-, 9- and 10-Eyes communities. They were created for restricting access to military and intelligence information to respective numbers of coalition nations. These 'Eyes' are used as handling instructions and often supported by dedicated communication ne...

(Updated: June 28, 2016) Last week, the German weekly Der Spiegel revealed that NSA intercepted the mobile phone of the German chancellor Angela Merkel. Although most details were not known yet, the fact itself caused a severe crisis in the relationship between the United States and Germany. Meanwhile, the original NSA targeting record containing chancellor Merkel's phone number has been published. One of the entries refers to a document about the NSA's SYNAPSE data model , which was disclosed earlier and provides us with a context for the targeting record. Finally, an impression of how the interception could have been conducted is given by a picture of the SCS interception equipment , which is presumably located in the US embassy in Berlin. The NSA targeting record The NSA document mentioning Merkel's phone number was published in the print editions of several German newspapers, but the tabloid paper BILD made a scan for their website: Acoording to Der Spiegel, thi...