2010s global surveillance disclosures

[4] Other security and intelligence agencies involved in the practice of global surveillance include those in Australia (ASD), Britain (GCHQ), Canada (CSE), Denmark (PET), France (DGSE), Germany (BND), Italy (AISE), the Netherlands (AIVD), Norway (NIS), Spain (CNI), Switzerland (NDB), Singapore (SID) as well as Israel (ISNU), which receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens from the NSA.

[24] Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows: Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

On June 5, in the first media report based on the leaked material,[92] The Guardian exposed a top secret court order showing that the NSA had collected phone records from over 120 million Verizon subscribers.

[94] On June 6, 2013, the second media disclosure, the revelation of the PRISM surveillance program (which collects the e-mail, voice, text and video chats of foreigners and an unknown number of Americans from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and other tech giants),[95][96][97][98] was published simultaneously by The Guardian and The Washington Post.

[121] The U.S. government made as part of its UPSTREAM data collection program deals with companies to ensure that it had access to and hence the capability to surveil undersea fiber-optic cables which deliver e-mails, Web pages, other electronic communications and phone calls from one continent to another at the speed of light.

[134] The Guardian revealed further details of the NSA's XKeyscore tool, which allows government analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals without prior authorization.

The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is also in a partnership with British, American and Singaporean intelligence agencies to tap undersea fibre optic telecommunications cables that link Asia, the Middle East and Europe and carry much of Australia's international phone and internet traffic.

[152][153] An internal NSA audit from May 2012 identified 2776 incidents i.e. violations of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans and foreign targets in the U.S. in the period from April 2011 through March 2012, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes are not intentional.

[163] A letter drafted by the Obama administration specifically to inform Congress of the government's mass collection of Americans' telephone communications data was withheld from lawmakers by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee in the months before a key vote affecting the future of the program.

[173] After the U.S. Foreign Secret Intelligence Court ruled in October 2011 that some of the NSA's activities were unconstitutional, the agency paid millions of dollars to major internet companies to cover extra costs incurred in their involvement with the PRISM surveillance program.

[176] The Guardian and The New York Times reported on secret documents leaked by Snowden showing that the NSA has been in "collaboration with technology companies" as part of "an aggressive, multipronged effort" to weaken the encryption used in commercial software, and GCHQ has a team dedicated to cracking "Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook" traffic.

[183] Germany's domestic security agency Bundesverfassungsschutz (BfV) systematically transfers the personal data of German residents to the NSA, CIA and seven other members of the United States Intelligence Community, in exchange for information and espionage software.

[192] In the United States, the NSA uses the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs of American citizens to create sophisticated graphs of their social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.

A confidential memo revealed that the NSA encouraged senior officials in such Departments as the White House, State and The Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency could add the telephone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.

"[220] Under Britain's MUSCULAR programme, the NSA and GCHQ have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world and thereby gained the ability to collect metadata and content at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts.

[254] Other high-ranking Indonesian politicians targeted by the DSD include: Carrying the title "3G impact and update", a classified presentation leaked by Snowden revealed the attempts of the ASD/DSD to keep up to pace with the rollout of 3G technology in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia.

[258] The Dutch Newspaper also reported that NSA infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide, often covertly, with malicious spy software, sometimes in cooperation with local authorities, designed to steal sensitive information.

[262][263][264][265] The Washington Post also reported that both GCHQ and the NSA make use of location data and advertising tracking files generated through normal internet browsing (with cookies operated by Google, known as "Pref") to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.

[297] Leon granted the request for a preliminary injunction that blocks the collection of phone data for two private plaintiffs (Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer, and Charles Strange, father of a cryptologist killed in Afghanistan when his helicopter was shot down in 2011)[298] and ordered the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered.

"[297] However federal judge William H. Pauley III in New York City ruled[299] the U.S. government's global telephone data-gathering system is needed to thwart potential terrorist attacks, and that it can only work if everyone's calls are swept in.

[306] Dating from 2008, the catalog revealed the existence of special gadgets modified to capture computer screenshots and USB flash drives secretly fitted with radio transmitters to broadcast stolen data over the airwaves, and fake base stations intended to intercept mobile phone signals, as well as many other secret devices and software implants listed here: The Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division of the NSA intercepted the shipping deliveries of computers and laptops in order to install spyware and physical implants on electronic gadgets.

[315] Once a quantum computer is successfully built, it would enable the NSA to unlock the encryption that protects data held by banks, credit card companies, retailers, brokerages, governments and health care providers.

[336][337][338][339] According to research by Süddeutsche Zeitung and TV network NDR the mobile phone of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder was monitored from 2002 onward, reportedly because of his government's opposition to military intervention in Iraq.

The two main tactics that are currently used are the injection of all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and the use of social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.

"[405] Snowden provided journalists at The Intercept with GCHQ documents regarding another secret program "Karma Police", calling itself "the world's biggest" data mining operation, formed to create profiles on every visible Internet user's browsing habits.

[425] Domestically, President Barack Obama claimed that there is "no spying on Americans",[426][427] and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney asserted that the surveillance programs revealed by Snowden have been authorized by Congress.

Thomas de Maiziere, a close ally of Merkel, told Der Spiegel: "U.S. intelligence methods may be justified to a large extent by security needs, but the tactics are excessive and over-the-top.

"[20] Edward Lucas, former Moscow bureau chief for The Economist, agreed, asserting that "Snowden's revelations neatly and suspiciously fits the interests of one country: Russia" and citing Masha Gessen's statement that "The Russian propaganda machine has not gotten this much mileage out of a US citizen since Angela Davis's murder trial in 1971.

"[460] Bob Cesca objected to The New York Times failing to redact the name of an NSA employee and the specific location where an al Qaeda group was being targeted in a series of slides the paper made publicly available.

[464] In late 2014, Freedom House said "[s]ome states are using the revelations of widespread surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as an excuse to augment their own monitoring capabilities, frequently with little or no oversight, and often aimed at the political opposition and human rights activists.

The Mira hotel in Hong Kong, where Edward Snowden hosted his first meeting with Glenn Greenwald , Laura Poitras , and journalist Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian [ 86 ]
PRISM: a clandestine surveillance program under which the NSA collects user data from companies such as Facebook and Microsoft .
Slide from a 2008 NSA presentation about XKeyscore , showing a world map with the locations of XKeyscore servers
On June 11, 2013, The Guardian published a snapshot of the NSA's global map of electronic data collection for the month of March 2013. Known as the Boundless Informant , the program is used by the NSA to track the amount of data being analyzed over a specific period of time. The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance). Outside the Middle East, only China, Germany, India, Kenya , Colombia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are colored orange or yellow
An NSA presentation called "Your target is using a BlackBerry? Now what?" shows an intercepted Mexican government e-mail.
On October 4, 2013, The Washington Post published a PowerPoint presentation leaked by Snowden, showing how the NSA had compromised the Tor encrypted network that is being employed by hundreds of thousands of people to circumvent "nation state internet policies". By secretly exploiting a JavaScript plug-in , the NSA found out the identities of various anonymous Internet users such as dissidents, terrorists, and other targets
On November 23, 2013, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad released a top secret NSA presentation leaked by Snowden, showing five "Classes of Accesses" that the NSA uses in its worldwide signals intelligence operations. [ 40 ] [ 259 ] These five "Classes of Accesses" are:
3rd PARTY/LIAISON —refers to data provided by the international partners of the NSA. Within the framework of the UKUSA Agreement , these international partners are known as "third parties.
REGIONAL —refers to over 80 regional Special Collection Services (SCS). The SCS is a black budget program operated by the NSA and the CIA, with operations based in many cities such as Athens , Bangkok , Berlin, Brasília , Budapest , Frankfurt, Geneva , Lagos , Milan, New Delhi, Paris, Prague , Vienna, and Zagreb , and others, targeting Central America, the Arabian Peninsula , East Asia, and Continental Europe .
CNE —an abbreviation for " Computer Network Exploitation ". It is performed by a special cyber-warfare unit of the NSA known as Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which infected over 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information, and is mostly aimed at Brazil , China, Egypt , India , Mexico , Saudi Arabia , and parts of Eastern Europe
LARGE CABLE —20 major points of accesses, many of them located within the United States
FORNSAT —an abbreviation for "Foreign Satellite Collection". It refers to intercepts from satellites that process data used by other countries such as Britain, Norway , Japan, and the Philippines .
On January 27, 2014, The New York Times released [ 327 ] an internal NSA document from a 2010 meeting that details the extent of the agency's surveillance on smartphones . Data collected include phone settings, network connections, web browsing history , buddy lists , downloaded documents, encryption usage, and user agents. Notice the following line of text at the bottom – " TOP SECRET//COMINT//REL TO USA, FVEY " – which is used to indicated that this top secret document is related to communications intelligence (COMINT), and can be accessed by the US and its Five Eyes (FVEY) partners in Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand
On June 7, 2013, President Obama emphasized the importance of surveillance to prevent terrorist attacks
Lawyers and judges protest boundless monitoring at PRISM debate in Germany, 18 November 2013