faulker064

(Updated: May 30, 2015) Just over a week ago, the regional German paper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the regional broadcasters NDR and WDR came with a story saying that between 2004 and 2008, the German foreign intelligence service BND had tapped into the Frankfurt internet exchange DE-CIX and shared the intercepted data with the NSA. As not all communications of German citizens could be filtered out, this is considered a violation of the constitution. Here we will give a summary of what is currently known about this BND operation and we will combine this with information from earlier reports. This will show that it was most likely part of the RAMPART-A program of the NSA, which includes similar interception efforts by foreign partner agencies. Finally, we will look at where exactly the BND interception might have taken place. > See also: New details about the joint NSA-BND operation Eikonal Update #1: On October 20, the Danish paper Information has confirmed that the German BND ope...

(Updated: February 9, 2016) One of the most important documents that has been disclosed as part of the Snowden-leaks is also one of the least-known: the Strategic Mission List from January 2007, which provides a detailed list of the goals and priorities for the National Security Agency (NSA). This Strategic Mission List was published by The New York Times on November 2, 2013, as one of three original NSA documents that accompanied a long report about the how NSA spies on both enemies and allies. > The Strategic Mission List in .pdf-format About the publication On the website of The New York Times (NYT), the Strategic Mission List was published as a series of images in png-format, which made it impossible to copy or search the text. It was also difficult to print the document in a readable way. For reasons unknown, NYT is the only media-outlet that published Snowden-documents in this not very user-friendly way. Hence I asked The New York Times whether they could provide the Strat...

(Updated: May 16, 2015) Last week, on September 6, the US Justice Department released a declassified version of a 2004 memorandum about the STELLARWIND program. The memorandum (pdf) is about the legality of STELLARWIND, which was a program under which NSA was authorized to collect content and metadata without the warrants that were needed previously. Here we will not discuss the STELLARWIND program itself, but take a close look at the STELLARWIND classification marking, which causes some confusion. Also we learn about the existance of mysterious compartments that point to some highly sensitive but yet undisclosed interception programs. > See also: The US Classification System Classification marking of the 2004 DoJ memorandum about STELLARWIND The redacted markings The first thing we see is that two portions of the classification marking have been blacked out: 1. The redacted space beween two double slashes This is very strange, because according to the official classification ma...

(Updated: February 7, 2018) For fulfilling its task of gathering foreign signals intelligence, the National Security Agency (NSA) is cooperating with partner agencies from over 35 countries all over the world. These relationships are based upon secret bilateral agreements, but there are also some select groups in which intelligence information is shared on a multilateral basis, like the SIGINT Seniors Europe (SSEUR), the SIGINT Seniors Pacific (SSPAC) and the Afghanistan SIGINT Coalition (AFSC). Until recently, very little was known about these foreign relationships, but the Snowden-leaks have revealed the names of all the countries that are cooperating with NSA. This made it possible to create the following graphic, which also shows various multilateral intelligence exchange groups, which will be discussed here too. - 2nd Party Partners - 3rd Party Partners - Multilateral groups - Nations with 2nd and 3rd Party status and those who are members of the SIGINT Seniors Europe (SSEUR)...

(Updated: December 29, 2015) In an earlier posting on this weblog we took a look at the phones used by the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which included an eye-catching red one. In some more recent pictures we can see that this red phone has apparently been replaced by an interesting looking white telephone. Although this device itself is white, it has a rarely seen but very distinctive feature: a red curly cord for the handset and also a red cable for the phone line. The buttons are also surrounded by some kind of red overlay: Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, meets with Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, July 26, 2014 in Tel Aviv. (Photo: Handout/Getty - Click to enlarge) The dark gray phone at the left is a more common Nortel M3904 executive phone - a model which is also used at the NSA headquaters and at the office of the British prime minister. Nortel was a big Canadian telephone equipment manufacturer, but was dissolved in...

(Updated: September 15, 2014) This time we present an article written in cooperation with the French weblog about intelligence and defence Zone d'Intérêt in which we compare the data collection of Google to intelligence agencies like NSA: Introduction Since 1998, Google has grown to become an essential part of the web infrastructure and took an important place in the daily lives of millions. Google offers great products, from search engine to video hosting, blogs and productivity services. Each day, users provide Google, willingly and candidly, with many different kind of personal information, exclusive data and files. Google justifies this data collection for commercial purposes, the selling of targeted ads and the enhancement of its mostly free services. These terabytes of user data and user generated content would be of tremendous value to any intelligence service. As former director of CIA and NSA Michael Hayden half-jokingly stated at Munk debates : " It covers your te...