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Since March 5, The New Zealand Herald and the website The Intercept published a number of stories based on top secret documents regarding New Zealand. These stories followed last year's claims by Edward Snowden saying that the New Zealand signals intelligence agency GCSB is involved in indiscriminate and illegal mass surveillance of ordinary citizens. Here we will take a close look at the original documentes that accompanied these reportings and put them in a broader context in order to see whether they support these claims or not. Attention will also be paid to the notorious XKEYSCORE system. - GCSB satellite collection - XKEYSCORE - GCSB cable access - Conclusion The listening station at Waihopai (SIGAD: NZC-333) in New Zealand after activists deflated one of the kevlar radomes in April 2008 (Source: GCSB presentation - Click to enlarge)   GCSB satellite collection In the first story from March 5, it was claimed that New Zealand's signals intelligence agency GCSB cond...

(Updated: November 18, 2016) From the Snowden revelations we learned not only about NSA data collection projects, but also about many software tools that are used to analyze and search those data. These programs run on secure computer networks, isolated from the public internet. Here we will provide an overview of these networks that are used by the US military and US intelligence agencies. Besides computer networks, they also use a number of dedicated telephone networks, but gradually these are transferred from traditional circuit-switched networks to Voice over IP (VoIP). This makes it possible to have only one IP packet-switched network for both computer and phone services. It seems that for example NSA's NSTS phone system is now fully IP-based. An old NSTS telephone and a KVM-switch which enables switching between physically separated networks, in this case two Unclassified (green labels), one Secret (red label) and one Top Secret/SCI (orange and yellow label) network (Natio...

(Updated: February 27, 2015) Last Thursday, February 19, the website The Intercept broke a big story about how NSA and GCHQ hacked the security company Gemalto in order to acquire large numbers of keys used in the SIM cards of mobile phones. The story has quite some background information about how these keys are used and how NSA and GCHQ conducted this operation. But as we have often seen with revelations based upon the Snowden-documents, media once again came with headlines like " Sim card database hack gave US and UK spies access to billions of cellphones ", which is so exaggerated that it is almost a scandal in itself. Instead, analysing The Intercept's article and the original documents leads to the conclusion that the goals of this operation were most likely limited to tactical military operations - something that was completely ignored in most press reports. Also there is no evidence that Gemalto was more involved in this than other SIM card suppliers. To what ext...

(UPDATED July 5, 2017) During his very first interview , former NSA contractor Edward Snowden pretended that he, sitting behind his desk " certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, or even the President if I had a personal e-mail ". Right from the beginning, intelligence experts doubted that individual NSA analysts would have such far-reaching powers. By looking at the legal authorities and procedures that regulate NSA's collection efforts, it becomes clear that it is highly unlikely that Snowden, or other analysts could have done that in a legitimate way. Targeting US citizens under FISA authority The National Security Agency (NSA) collects foreign signals intelligence outside the US, but in a few special cases, it is also allowed to collect data about US citizens or to collect data inside the US. This is shown in the following decision tree: Diagram with a decision tree showing the various legal authorities under ...