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(Updated: January 6, 2017) Most of the Snowden-revelations are about spying on the internet, but NSA and GCHQ are also conducting the more traditional collection of telephone communications that go through satellite links. What needs to be done before phone calls can be collected, can be learned from two highly detailed technical reports from the GCHQ listening station near Bude in the UK. These reports were published on August 31 last year by the German magazine Der Spiegel and the website The Intercept as part of a story about how Turkey is both a partner and a target for US intelligence. Here we will analyse what's in these reports, which give an interesting impression of the techniques used to transmit telephone communications over satellite links. Satellite dishes at the GCHQ intercept station near Bude, Cornwall, UK Officially, such technical reports are called "informal reports", as opposed to the "serialized reports" that contain finished intelligence...

(Updated: January 16, 2015) This is part III about the German parliamentary committee which investigates NSA spying activities and the cooperation between NSA and the German foreign intelligence service BND . The hearings of a number of BND employees which are summarized below, provided many interesting details about BND cable and satellite collection and how these data are selected and filtered and how privacy rights are implemented. This was especially of concern for the cooperation between NSA and BND in the Joint SIGINT Activity (JSA). The witnesses also stated that contrary to the initial press report, under the joint operation Eikonal not a single German communication was passed on to NSA. These summaries are based upon transcripts of a live blog, kept by volunteers of the German digital civil rights website Netzpolitik.org , who attended the hearings. The employees of the BND are designated by initials, not of their real names, but of those of the cover names they are using wh...

This is part II about the German parliamentary committee which investigates NSA spying activities and the cooperation between NSA and the German foreign intelligence service BND . Here we provide summaries of the hearings of a number of BND employees, who provided some interesting details about satellite interception at the Bad Aibling station, the subsequent processing and storage of data and also about the cooperation between NSA and BND in the Joint SIGINT Activity (JSA). These summaries are based upon transcripts of a live blog, kept by volunteers of the German digital civil rights website Netzpolitik.org , who attended the hearings. The employees of the BND are designated by initials, not of their real names, but of those of the cover names they are using when at work(!). > See also: Introduction + Hearings, Part I The room where the hearings of the parliamentary committee take place (photo: DPA) 14th Meeting, September 25, 2014 ( Transcript ) - Hearing of the witness Mr. R. ...

(Updated: June 28, 2016) Over the last days, there were some new developments regarding the eavesdropping on the mobile phone of the German chancellor Angela Merkel , which was revealed in October last year. It was clarified that the record from an NSA database that was presented as evidence for this tapping, wasn't actually an original NSA document, but just a transcription. Also, this database record wasn't among the Snowden-documents. This means the information about monitoring Merkel's phone was not provided by Edward Snowden, but by another leaker, something that many people may not have been aware of. Criminal investigation In June of this year, the highest German public prosecutor ( Generalbundesanwalt ) started a criminal investigation against NSA regarding the alleged eavesdropping on chancellor Merkel. Last month it was reported that this case had been closed as no sufficient evidence had been found, but this was not fully correct. In his annual press conference ...

(Last edited: January 9, 2018) Recently disclosed documents show that the NSA's fourth-largest cable tapping program, codenamed INCENSER, pulls its data from just one single source: a submarine fiber optic cable linking Asia with Europe. Until now, it was only known that INCENSER was a sub-program of WINDSTOP and that it collected some 14 billion pieces of internet data a month. The latest revelations now say that these data were collected with the help of the British company Cable & Wireless (codenamed GERONTIC, now part of Vodafone) at a location in Cornwall in the UK, codenamed NIGELLA. For the first time, this gives us a view on the whole interception chain, from the parent program all the way down to the physical interception facility. Here we will piece together what is known about these different stages and programs from recent and earlier publications. - NIGELLA - GERONTIC - INCENSER - WINDSTOP - The cables tapped at NIGELLA by GERONTIC under the INCENSER and WINDST...