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(UPDATED December 9, 2017) On July 12, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published two Top Secret NSA compliance reports, which were obtained after declassification under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). Here we will take a look the classification marking of these reports, of which one part has been redacted: Both documents are quarterly reports from the NSA to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on compliance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which governs both the PRISM and the Upstream collection efforts. One of the reports is from March 2014 , the other one from March 2015 . More about the content of these two compliance reports can be found in this article by The Hill, as well as in this posting on the weblog EmptyWheel.net. Here we will take a look at the classification of these reports. Classification marking The classification line of both reports is: TOP SECRET//[...]/SI//ORCON/NOFORN , which stands for: - TOP SECRET: the highe...

(Updated: September 21, 2017) Since the Snowden revelations, we know that signals intelligence agencies are trying to acquire large sets of telephone metadata in order to analyse them in support of protecting their national security. Less known is that commercial companies also analyse similar big data sets, albeit for research purposes and with personal information being anonymized. Now, a research report from the Netherlands provides us with actual numbers of mobile telephone metadata, which can be used to compare with the numbers that NSA and GCHQ collected according to the Snowden documents. Tourist movements Recently published was a report about visitor movements in and around the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. It was prepared by the economic research company Decisio on behalf of the province of Noord-Holland and the municipalities of Amsterdam and Zandvoort. Since a few years, Amsterdam almost suffers from a huge increase of tourists, but it was difficult to get detailed insights ...

(Updated: August 26, 2017) About how signals intelligence agencies, like NSA and GCHQ, are intercepting communications, we learned a lot from the Snowden revelations and the German parliamentary inquiry, but also from new legislation in France , the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Much less is known about the practice of tapping by law enforcement, like for example the FBI and police forces. Now, a case from the Netherlands provides some interesting insights in how Dutch police intercepts internet communications - in a way that comes remarkably close to the bulk collection by intelligence agencies. - Cooperation with the Russians - Intercepting at Leaseweb - - Some questions - The end of ZeuS - Office of the Team High Tech Crime (THTC) of the Dutch police in Driebergen (photo: NRC/Merlin Daleman)   Cooperation with the Russians On Saturday, May 27, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant came with a surprising story about the cooperation between the Team High Tech Crime (THT...

Since the start of the Snowden-revelations in 2013, many people got the impression that the US National Security Agency (NSA) mainly intercepts the communications of ordinary citizens. In reality, the NSA is part of the Department of Defense and as such, a large part of its job is to collect data for tactical military purposes. A good example of the latter task comes from an internal NSA damage assessment report about the 2001 Hainan Island incident , in which an EP-3E electronic surveillance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter jet and had to make an emergency landing on the Chinese island of Hainan. The report was among the Snowden-documents and published by The Intercept on April 10. As will be shown here, it provides many details about both the interception and the encryption equipment aboard the EP-3E aircraft. A Lockheed EP-3E electronic surveillance aircraft from the US Navy (photo: US Navy - click to enlarge) Damage assessment The purpose of the report was to review and...

Last Thursday, April 6, the United States conducted airstrikes against Syria and president Trump received a briefing on this attack at his Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. The next day, his press secretary Sean Spicer tweeted a photo of this briefing, which shows some hitherto unseen and futuristic looking devices: Trump and his team of policy makers at Mar-a-Lago. April 6, 2017 (White House photo - click to enlarge) In the photo we see some kind of small guest or spare room with a rather narrow table and cheap chairs of the type that can be rented for events. At the far right side there seem to be dark curtains, indicating there may be windows. As was pointed out by Sean Spicer, the photo was redacted for security reasons: the content of the documents was erased. CNN provided a version of this photo showing who all the persons in the room are: (click to enlarge) Not present in the room were vice president Mike Pence, secretary of defense James Mattis and chairman of...