2010s global surveillance disclosures

Further information: Edward Snowden

Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners' global surveillance of foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. The vast majority of reports emanated from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian, attracting considerable public attention. The disclosure continued throughout the entire year of 2013, and a significant portion of the full cache of 1.5 million documents was later obtained and published by many other media outlets worldwide, most notably the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australia), O Globo (Brazil), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands), Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), Sveriges Television (Sweden), and The New York Times (USA).

In summary, these media reports have shed light on the implications of several secret treaties signed by members of the UKUSA Agreement in their efforts to implement global surveillance. For example, Der Spiegel revealed how the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) transfers "massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA", while Sveriges Television revealed that the Försvarets radioanstalt (FRA) of Sweden is continuously providing the NSA with intercepted data gathered from telecom cables, under a secret treaty signed in 1954 for bilateral cooperation on surveillance. Other security and intelligence agencies involved in the practice of global surveillance include those in Australia (ASD), Britain (GCHQ), Canada (CSEC), Denmark (PET), France (DGSE), Germany (BND), Italy (AISE), the Netherlands (AIVD), Norway (NIS), Spain (CNI), Switzerland (NDB), as well as Israel (ISNU), which receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens that is shared by the NSA.

The disclosure provided impetus for the creation of social movements against mass surveillance, such as Restore the Fourth. Domestic spying programs in countries such as France, the UK, and India have also been exposed. On the legal front, the Electronic Frontier Foundation joined a coalition of diverse groups filing suit against the NSA. Several human rights organizations have urged the Obama administration not to prosecute, but protect, "whistleblower Snowden": Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Transparency International, and the Index on Censorship, inter alia.

On June 14, 2013, United States prosecutors charged Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property. In late July 2013, he was granted asylum by the Russian government, contributing to a deterioration of Russia–United States relations. On August 6, 2013, President Obama made a public appearance on national television where he reassured Americans that "We don't have a domestic spying program" and "There is no spying on Americans". Towards the end of October 2013, the British Prime Minister David Cameron warned The Guardian not to publish any more leaks, or it will receive a DA-Notice. Currently, a criminal investigation of the disclosure is being undertaken by Britain's Metropolitan Police Service. In December 2013, The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said: "We have published I think 26 documents so far out of the 58,000 we've seen."

Overview

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. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations."

— The Washington Post

The disclosure revealed specific details of the NSA's close cooperation with U.S. federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in addition to the agency's previously undisclosed financial payments to numerous commercial partners and telecommunications companies, as well as its previously undisclosed relationships with international partners such as Britain, France Germany, and its secret treaties with foreign governments that were recently established for sharing intercepted data of each other's citizens.

Global surveillance

Main article: Global surveillance

Global surveillance programs
Program	International contributors and/or partners	Commercial partners
PRISM	Australian Signals Directorate (ASD/DSD) of Australia Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of Great Britain Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD) of the Netherlands	Microsoft
XKeyscore	Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) of Germany Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) of Germany Försvarets radioanstalt (FRA) of Sweden
Tempora	U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)	British Telecommunications (codenamed "Remedy") Interoute (codenamed "Streetcar") Level 3 (codenamed "Little") Global Crossing (codenamed "Pinnage") Verizon Business (codenamed "Dacron") Viatel (codenamed "Vitreous") Vodafone Cable (codenamed "Gerontic")
Muscular	NSA
Project 6	U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Stateroom	DSD Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) GCHQ Special Collection Service (SCS) of the NSA and the CIA
Lustre	NSA Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) of France

Last updated: December 2013

Historical context

Main article: History of the global surveillance disclosure

In the 1970s, NSA analyst Perry Fellwock (under the pseudonym "Winslow Peck") revealed the existence of the UKUSA Agreement, which forms the basis of the ECHELON network, whose existence was revealed in 1988 by Lockheed employee Margaret Newsham. Months before the September 11 attacks and during its aftermath, further details of the global surveillance apparatus were provided by ex-MI5 official David Shayler, followed by James Bashford in 2001, William Binney and colleagues in 2002, Katharine Gun in 2003, Clare Short in 2004, journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in 2005, Leslie Cauley of USA Today in 2006, Mark Klein in 2006, Russ Tice in 2006, Thomas Andrews Drake in 2010, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning in 2011, and Michael Hastings in 2012.

Timeline

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

2012

In April 2012, Edward Snowden began downloading sensitive NSA material while working for the American computer corporation Dell. By the end of the year, Snowden had made his first contact with journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.

January–May 2013

In January 2013, Snowden contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. In March 2013, Snowden took up a new job at Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, specifically to gain access to additional top-secret documents that could be leaked. In April 2013, Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City. In May 2013, Snowden was permitted temporary leave from his position at the NSA in Hawaii, on the pretext of receiving treatment for his epilepsy. Towards the end of May, Snowden flew to Hong Kong.

2013

June

After the U.S.-based editor of The Guardian held several meetings in New York City, it was decided that Greenwald, Poitras and Ewen MacAskill would fly to Hong Kong to meet Snowden. On June 5, in the first media report based on the leaked material, the Guardian exposed a top secret court order showing that the NSA had collected phone records from over 120 million Verizon subscribers. Under the order, the numbers of both parties on a call, as well as the location data, unique identifiers, time of call, and duration of call were handed over to the FBI, which turned over the records to the NSA.

On June 6, 2013, the second media disclosure was published simultaneously by Greenwald (The Guardian) and Poitras (The Washington Post).

Documents provided by Edward Snowden and seen by Der Spiegel revealed how the NSA spied on various diplomatic missions of the European Union (EU), including the EU's delegation to the United States in Washington D.C., the EU's delegation to the United Nations in New York, the Council of the European Union in Brussels, and the United Nations Headquarters in New York. During specific episodes within a four-year period, the NSA hacked several Chinese mobile-phone companies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Tsinghua University in Beijing, and the Asian fiber-optic network operator Pacnet. Only Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK are explicitly exempted from NSA attacks, whose main target in the EU is Germany. A method of bugging encrypted fax machines used at an EU embassy is codenamed Dropmire.

During the 2009 G-20 London summit, the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intercepted the communications of foreign diplomats. In addition, the GCHQ has been intercepting and storing mass quantities of fiber-optic traffic via Tempora. Two principal components of Tempora are called "Mastering the Internet" (MTI) and "Global Telecoms Exploitation". The data is preserved for three days while metadata is kept for thirty days. Data collected by the GCHQ under Tempora is shared with the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States.

The Guardian also revealed the existence of XKeyscore, which allows government analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals without prior authorization. Microsoft "developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the interception of encrypted chats on Outlook.com, within five months after the service went into testing. NSA had access to Outlook.com emails because “Prism collects this data prior to encryption.”

From 2001 to 2011, the NSA collected vast amounts of metadata records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans via Stellar Wind, which was later terminated due to operational and resource constraints. It was subsequently replaced by newer surveillance programs such as ShellTrumpet, which "processed its one trillionth metadata record" by the end of December 2012.

According to the Boundless Informant, over 97 billion pieces of intelligence were collected over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. Out of all 97 billion sets of information, about 3 billion data sets originated from U.S. computer networks and around 500 million metadata records were collected from German networks.

Several weeks later, it was revealed that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) of Germany transfers massive amounts of metadata records to the NSA.

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, and the United States are colored orange or yellow

July

According to the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, the NSA spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilian citizens, while Australia and New Zealand have been aiding the United States in their surveillance program.

The NSA gave the German intelligence agencies BND and BfV access to X-Keyscore. In return, the BND turned over copies of two systems named Mira4 and Veras, reported to exceed the NSA's SIGINT capabilities in certain areas. The NSA also provided the BND with analysis tools so that the BND can monitor foreign data streams flowing through Germany.

Even if there is no reason to suspect U.S. citizens the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center is allowed to examine the government files of for possible criminal behavior. Previously the NTC was barred to do so, unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

Snowden also confirmed that Stuxnet was cooperatively developed by the United States and Israel. In a report unrelated to Edward Snowden, the French newspaper Le Monde revealed thet France's DGSE was also undertaking mass surveillance, which it described as "illegal and outside any serious control".

File:Upstream-slide.jpg

On July 10, 2013, The Washington Post published a powerpoint presentation about the FAA702 Operations of the NSA, attributed to its Special Source Operations, in which NSA agents are tasked with the collection of communications from the following two sources:
1. Upstream – Under the first type of collection, data en route to its final destination would be intercepted via FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW, BLARNEY, and OAKSTAR 2. PRISM – Under the second type of collection, data that has already reached its final destination would be directly harvested from the servers of the following U.S. service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple Inc.

August

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden and jointly disclosed by Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and Norddeutscher Rundfunk revealed that several telecom operators have played a key role in helping the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) tap into worldwide fiber-optic communications. The telecom operators are:

• Verizon Business (codenamed "Dacron")
• British Telecommunications (codenamed "Remedy")
• Vodafone Cable (codenamed "Gerontic")
• Global Crossing (codenamed "Pinnage")
• Level 3 (codenamed "Little")
• Viatel (codenamed "Vitreous")
• Interoute (codenamed "Streetcar")

Each of them were assigned a particular area of the international fiber-optic network for which they were individually responsible. The following networks have been infiltrated by the GCHQ: TAT-14 (Europe-USA), Atlantic Crossing 1 (Europe-USA), Circe South (France-UK), Circe North (The Netherlands-UK), Flag Atlantic-1, Flag Europa-Asia, SEA-ME-WE 3 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe), SEA-ME-WE 4 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe), Solas (Ireland-UK), UK-France 3, UK-Netherlands 14, ULYSSES (Europe-UK), Yellow (UK-USA) and Pan European Crossing.

Telecommunication companies who participated were "forced" to do so and had "no choice in the matter". Some of the companies were subsequently paid by GCHQ for their participation in the infiltration of the cables. According to the SZ the GCHQ has access to the majority of internet and telephone communications flowing throughout Europe, can listen to phone calls, read emails and text messages, see which websites internet users from all around the world are visiting. It can also retain and analyse nearly the entire European internet traffic.

The GCHQ is collecting all data transmitted to and from the United Kingdom and Northern Europe via the undersea fibre optic telecommunications cable SEA-ME-WE 3. Singaporean intelligence co-operates with Australia in accessing and sharing communications carried by the SEA-ME-WE-3 cable. The Australian Signals Directorate, 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.

The U.S. runs a top-secret surveillance program, code named Special Collection Service, based in over 80 consulates and embassies worldwide, including Frankfurt Germany and Vienna, Austria. The NSA hacked the United Nations' video conferencing system in Summer 2012 in violation of a UN agreement. The Bundesnachrichtendienst is providing the NSA with metadata collected from German systems. In December 2012 alone, Germany provided the NSA with 500 million metadata records. The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, but also searching the contents of vast amounts of e-mail and text communications into and out of the country by Americans who mention information about foreigners under surveillance. It also spied on the Al Jazeera and gained access to its internal communications systems.

The NSA has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic. U.S. Law-enforcement agencies use tools used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects. 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.

The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. A legal opinion declassified on August 21, 2013 revealed that the NSA intercepted for three years as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans who weren’t suspected of having links to terrorism, before FISC court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011. Under the Corporate Partner Access project, major U.S. telecommunications providers receive hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the NSA. Voluntary cooperation between the NSA and the providers of global communications took off during the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY.

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.

The NSA paid GCHQ over £100 Million between 2009 and 2012, in exchange for these funds GCHQ "must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight." Documents referenced in the article explain that weaker laws regarding spying are "a selling point". GCHQ is also developing the technology to "exploit any mobile phone at any time." The NSA has under a legal authority a secret backdoor into its databases gathered from large Internet companies enabling it to search for U.S. citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board urged the U.S. intelligence chiefs to draft stronger US surveillance guidelines on domestic spying after finding that several of those guidelines have not been updated up to 30 years. U.S. intelligence analysts have deliberately broken rules designed to prevent them from spying on Americans by choosing to ignore so-called "minimisation procedures" aimed at protecting privacy.

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

"Mastering the Internet" (MTI) is part of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) of the British government that involves the insertion of thousands of DPI (deep packet inspection) "black boxes" at various internet service providers, as revealed by the British media in 2009.

In 2013, it was further revealed that the NSA had made a £17.2  million financial contribution to the project, which is capable of vacuuming signals from up to 200 fibre-optic cables at all physical points of entry into Great Britain.

File:KS8-001.jpg

As part of disclosures about the XKeyscore surveillance tool, The Guardian released a classified NSA powerpoint slide explaining the importance of monitoring the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) usage of "typical" Internet users. Notice the orange bar on top with the following line of text: "TOP SECRET//COMINT//REL TO USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL". This is used to indicate that the presentation is part of a top secret document about communications intelligence (COMINT) that is related to the "Five Eyes" of the United States, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand.

September

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 the GCHQ has a team dedicated to cracking "Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook" traffic.

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. Other countries such as Israel, Sweden and Italy are also cooperating with American and British intelligence agencies. Under a secret treaty codenamed "Lustre", French intelligence agencies transferred millions of metadata records to the NSA.

A special branch of the NSA called "Follow the Money" (FTM) monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions and later stores the collected data in the NSA's own financial databank "Tracfin". The NSA monitored the communications of Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff and her top aides. The agency also spied on Brazil's oil firm Petrobras as well as French diplomats, and gained access to the private network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France and the SWIFT network.

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. The NSA routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about U.S. citizens.

In an effort codenamed GENIE, computer specialists can control foreign computer networks using "covert implants,” a form of remotely transmitted malware on tens of thousands of devices annually. As worldwide sales of smartphones began exceeding those of feature phones, the NSA decided to take advantage of the smartphone boom. This is particularly advantageous because the smartphone combines a myriad of data that would interest an intelligence agency, such as social contacts, user behavior, interests, location, photos and credit card numbers and passwords.

An internal NSA report from 2010 stated that the spread of the smartphone has been occurring "extremely rapidly"—developments that "certainly complicate traditional target analysis." According to the document, the NSA has set up task forces assigned to several smartphone manufacturers and operating systems, including Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iOS operating system, as well as Google's Android mobile operating system. Similarly, Britain's GCHQ assigned a team to study and crack the BlackBerry.

Under the heading "iPhone capability", the document notes that there are smaller NSA programs, known as "scripts", that can perform surveillance on 38 different features of the iOS 3 and iOS 4 operating systems. These include the mapping feature, voicemail and photos, as well as Google Earth, Facebook and Yahoo! Messenger.

• A secret NSA presentation leaked to Laura Poitras and Der Spiegel regarding the NSA's iPhone Location Services
• Who knew in 1984...
  Who knew in 1984...
• ...that this would be big brother...
  ...that this would be big brother...
• ...and the Zombies would be paying customers?[178]
  ...and the Zombies would be paying customers?

October

On October 4, 2013, The Washington Post and The Guardian jointly reported that the NSA and the GCHQ have made repeated attempts to spy on anonymous Internet users who have been communicating in secret via the anonymity network Tor. Several of these surveillance operations involve the implantation of malicious code into the computers of Tor users who visit particular websites. The NSA and GCHQ have partly succeeded in blocking access to the anonymous network, diverting Tor users to insecure channels. The government agencies were also able to uncover the identity of some anonymous Internet users.

The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) has been using a program called Olympia to map the communications of Brazil's Mines and Energy Ministry by targeting the metadata of phone calls and emails to and from the ministry.

The Australian Federal Government knew about the PRISM surveillance program months before Edward Snowden made details public.

The German Federal Government also knew about the PRISM surveillance program long before Edward Snowden made details public. According to the German government, however, there are two separate PRISM programs - one is used by the NSA and the other is used by NATO forces in Afghanistan. Both surveillance programs are "not identical".

The NSA monitored the public email account of former Mexican president Felipe Calderón (thus gaining access to the communications of high ranking cabinet members), the E-Mails of several high-ranking members of Mexico's security forces and text and the mobile phone communication of current Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. The NSA tries to gather cellular and landline phone numbers—often obtained from American diplomats—for as many foreign officials as possible. The contents of the phone calls are stored in computer databases that can regularly be searched using keywords.

The NSA has been monitoring telephone conversations of 35 world leaders. The U.S. government's first public acknowledgment that it tapped the phones of world leaders was reported on October 28, 2013 by the Wall Street Journal after an internal U.S. government internal review turned up NSA monitoring of some 35 world leaders. The GCHQ has tried to keep its mass surveillance program a secret because it feared a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities which could lead to legal challenges against them.

The Guardian revealed that the NSA had been monitoring telephone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another U.S. government department. 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. Reacting to the news, German leader Angela Merkel, arriving in Brussels for an EU summit, accused the U.S. of a breach of trust, saying: "We need to have trust in our allies and partners, and this must now be established once again. I repeat that spying among friends is not at all acceptable against anyone, and that goes for every citizen in Germany." The NSA collected in 2010 data on ordinary Americans’ cellphone locations, but later discontinued it because it had no “operational value.”

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

The mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel might have been tapped by U.S. intelligence. According to the Spiegel this monitoring goes back to 2002 and ended in the summer of 2013, while the New York Times reported that Germany has evidence that the NSA's surveillance of Merkel began during George W. Bush's tenure. After learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the NSA has been listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel compared the snooping practices of the NSA with those of the Stasi.

On October 31, 2013, Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of the German Bundestag, met Snowden in Moscow and revealed the former intelligence contractor's readiness to brief the German government on NSA spying.

A highly sensitive signals intelligence collection program known as Stateroom involves the interception of radio, telecommunications and internet traffic. It is operated out of the diplomatic missions of the Five Eyes (Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, United States) in numerous locations around the world. The program conducted at U.S. diplomatic missions is run in concert by the U.S. intelligence agencies NSA and CIA in a joint venture group called "Special Collection Service" (SCS), whose members work undercover in shielded areas of the American Embassies and Consulates, where they are officially accredited as diplomats and as such enjoy special privileges. Under diplomatic protection, they are able to look and listen unhindered. The SCS for example used the American Embassy near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to monitor communications in Germany's government district with its parliament and the seat of the government.

Under the Stateroom surveillance programme, Australia operates clandestine surveillance facilities to intercept phone calls and data across much of Asia.

In France, the NSA targeted people belonging to the worlds of business, politics or French state administration. The NSA monitored and recorded the content of telephone communications and the history of the connections of each target i.e. the metadata. The actual surveillance operation was performed by French intelligence agencies on behalf of the NSA. The cooperation between France and the NSA was confirmed by the Director of the NSA, Keith B. Alexander, who asserted that foreign intelligence services collected phone records in "war zones" and "other areas outside their borders" and provided them to the NSA.

The French newspaper Le Monde also disclosed new PRISM and Upstream slides (See Page 4, 7 and 8) coming from the "PRISM/US-984XN Overview" presentation.

In Spain, the NSA intercepted the telephone conversations, text messages and emails of millions of Spaniards, and spied on members of the Spanish government. Between December 10, 2012 and January 8, 2013, the NSA collected metadata on 60 million telephone calls in Spain.

According to documents leaked by Snowden, the surveillance of Spanish citizens was jointly conducted by the NSA in close cooperation with Spanish intelligence agencies.

On October 4, 2013, The Washington Post published a powerpoint presentation leaked by Snowden, showing how the NSA has 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 is able to uncover the identities of various anonymous Internet users such as dissidents, terrorists, and other targets

November

The New York Times reported that the NSA carries out an eavesdropping effort, dubbed Operation Dreadnought, against the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. During his 2009 visit to Iranian Kurdistan, the agency collaborated with the GCHQ and the U.S.'s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, collecting radio transmissions between aircraft and airports, examining Khamenei's convoy with satellite imagery, and enumerating military radar stations. According to the story, an objective of the operation is "communications fingerprinting": the ability to distinguish Khamenei's communications from those of other people in Iran.

The same story revealed an operation code-named Ironavenger, in which the NSA intercepted e-mails sent between a country allied with the United States and the government of "an adversary". The ally was conducting a spear-phishing attack: its e-mails contained malware. The NSA gathered documents and login credentials belonging to the enemy country, along with knowledge of the ally's capabilities for attacking computers.

According to the British newspaper The Independent, the British intelligence agency GCHQ maintains a listening post on the roof of the British Embassy in Berlin that is capable of intercepting mobile phone calls, wi-fi data and long-distance communications all over the German capital, including adjacent government buildings such as the Reichstag (seat of the German parliament) and the Chancellery (seat of Germany's head of government) clustered around the Brandenburg Gate.

Operating under the code-name "Quantum Insert", the GCHQ set up a fake website masquerading as LinkedIn, a social website used for professional networking, as part of its efforts to install surveillance software on the computers of the telecommunications operator Belgacom. In addition, the headquarters of the oil cartel OPEC were infiltrated by the GCHQ as well as the NSA, which bugged the computers of nine OPEC employees and monitored the General Secretary of OPEC.

For more than three years the GCHQ has been using an automated monitoring system code-named "Royal Concierge" to infiltrate the reservation systems of at least 350 upscale hotels in many different parts of the world in order to target, search and analyze reservations to detect diplomats and government officials. First tested in 2010, the aim of the "Royal Concierge" is to track down the travel plans of diplomats, and it is often supplemented with surveillance methods related to human intelligence (HUMINT). Other covert operations include the wiretapping of room telephones and fax machines used in targeted hotels as well as the monitoring of computers hooked up to the hotel network.

In November 2013, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Guardian claimed that the Australian Signals Directorate (DSD) had attempted to listen to the private phone calls of the president of Indonesia and his wife. The Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, confirmed that he and the president had contacted the ambassador in Canberra. Natalegawa said any tapping of Indonesian politicians’ personal phones “violates every single decent and legal instrument I can think of—national in Indonesia, national in Australia, international as well”. Other high ranking Indonesian politicians targeted by the DSD include:

• Boediono (Vice President)
• Jusuf Kalla (Former Vice President)
• Dino Patti Djalal (Ambassador to the United States)
• Andi Mallarangeng (Government spokesperson)
• Hatta Rajasa (State Secretary)
• Sri Mulyani Indrawati (Former Finance Minister and current managing director of the World Bank)
• Widodo Adi Sutjipto (Former Commander-in-Chief of the military)
• Sofyan Djalil (Senior government advisor)

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. The ASD/DSD motto placed at the bottom of each page reads: "Reveal their secrets—protect our own."

Under a secret deal approved by British intelligence officials, the NSA has been storing and analyzing the internet and email records of UK citizens since 2007. The NSA also proposed in 2005 a procedure for spying on the citizens of the UK and other Five-Eyes nations alliance, even where the partner government has explicitly denied the U.S. permission to do so. Under the proposal, partner countries must neither be informed about this particular type of surveillance, nor the procedure of doing so.

Towards the end of November, The New York Times released an internal NSA report outlining the agency's efforts to expand its surveillance abilities. The five-page document asserts that the law of the United States has not kept up with the needs of the NSA to conduct mass surveillance in the "golden age" of signals intelligence, but there are grounds for optimism because, in the NSA's own words:

"The culture of compliance, which has allowed the American people to entrust NSA with extraordinary authorities, will not be compromised in the face of so many demands, even as we aggressively pursue legal authorities..."

The report, titled "SIGNT Strategy 2012–2016", also said that the U.S. will try to influence the "global commercial encryption market" through "commercial relationships", and emphasized the need to "revolutionize" the analysis of its vast data collection to "radically increase operational impact".

On November 23, 2013, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported that the Netherlands was targeted by U.S. intelligence agencies in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This period of surveillance lasted from 1946 to 1968, and also included the interception of the communications of other European countries including Belgium, France, West Germany and Norway.

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. 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

December

According to the classified documents leaked by Snowden, the Australian Signals Directorate, formerly known as the Defence Signals Directorate, had offered to share information on Australian citizens with the other intelligence agencies of the UKUSA Agreement. Data shared with foreign countries include "bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata" such as "medical, legal or religious information".

The Washington Post revealed that the NSA has been tracking the locations of mobile phones from all over the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. In the process of doing so, the NSA collects more than five billion records of phone locations on a daily basis. This enables NSA analysts to map cellphone owners’ relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths.

The Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS), which cooperates with the NSA, has gained access to Russian targets in the Kola Peninsula and other civilian targets. In general, the NIS provides information to the NSA about "Politicians", "Energy" and "Armament". A top secret memo of the NSA lists the following years as milestones of the Norway-United States of America SIGNT agreement, or NORUS Agreement:

• 1952 - Informal starting year of cooperation between the NIS and the NSA

• 1954 - Formalization of the agreement

• 1963 - Extension of the agreement for coverage of foreign instrumentation signals intelligence (FISINT)

• 1970 - Extension of the agreement for coverage of electronic intelligence (ELINT)

• 1994 - Extension of the agreement for coverage of communications intelligence (COMINT)

The NSA considers the NIS to be one of its most reliable partners. Both agencies also cooperate to crack the encryption systems of mutual targets. According to the NSA, Norway has made no objections to its requests from the NIS.

On 5 December, Sveriges Television (Swedish Television) reported that the National Defence Radio Establishment of Sweden (FRA) has been conducting a clandestine surveillance operation targeting the internal politics of Russia. The operation was conducted on behalf of the NSA, which receives data handed over to it by the FRA. The Swedish-American surveillance operation also targeted Russian energy interests as well as the Baltic states. As part of the UKUSA Agreement, a secret treaty was signed in 1954 by Sweden with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, regarding collaboration and intelligence sharing.

As a result of Snowden's disclosures, the notion of Swedish neutrality in international politics has been called into question. In an internal document dating from the year 2006, the NSA acknowledged that its "relationship" with Sweden is "protected at the TOP SECRET level because of that nation’s political neutrality." Specific details of Sweden's cooperation with members of the UKUSA Agreement include:

• The FRA has been granted access to XKeyscore, an analytical database of the NSA.

• Sweden updated the NSA on changes in Swedish legislation that provided the legal framework for information sharing between the FRA and the Swedish Security Service.

• Since January 2013, a counterterrorism analyst of the NSA has been stationed in the Swedish capital of Stockholm

• Several years before the Riksdag of Sweden passed the controversial FRA law, which allows the FRA to warrantlessly wiretap all telephone and Internet traffic that crosses Sweden's borders, the NSA, the GCHQ and the FRA signed an agreement in 2004 that allows the FRA to directly collaborate with the NSA without having to consult the GCHQ.

In order to identify targets for government hacking and surveillance, both the GCHQ and the NSA have used advertising cookies operated by Google, known as Pref, to "pinpoint" targets. According to documents leaked by Snowden, the Special Source Operations of the NSA has been sharing information containing "logins, cookies, and GooglePREFID" with the Tailored Access Operations division of the NSA, as well as Britain's GCHQ agency.

During the 2010 G-20 Toronto summit, the U.S. embassy in Ottawa was transformed into a security command post during a six-day spying operation that was conducted by the NSA and closely co-ordinated with the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). The goal of the spying operation was, among others, to obtain information on international development, banking reform, and to counter trade protectionism to support "U.S. policy goals." On behalf of the NSA, the CSEC has set up covert spying posts in 20 countries around the world.

In Italy the Special Collection Service of the NSA maintains two separate surveillance posts in Rome and Milan. According to a secret NSA memo dated September 2010, the Italian embassy in Washington, D.C. has been targeted by two spy operations of the NSA:

• Under the codename "Bruneau", which refers to mission "Lifesaver", the NSA sucks out all the information stored in the embassy's computers and creates electronic images of hard disk drives.

• Under the codename "Hemlock", which refers to mission "Highlands", the NSA gains access to the embassy's communications through physical "implants".

Due to concerns that terrorist or criminal networks may be secretly communicating via computer games, the NSA, the GCHQ, the CIA, and the FBI have been conducting surveillance and scooping up data from the networks of many online games, including massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, as well as virtual worlds such as Second Life, and the Xbox gaming console.

The NSA has cracked the most commonly used cellphone encryption technology, A5/1. According to a classified document leaked by Snowden, the agency can "process encrypted A5/1" even when it has not acquired an encryption key. In addition, the NSA uses various types of cellphone infrastructure, such as the links between carrier networks, to determine the location of a cellphone user tracked by Visitor Location Registers.

US district court judge for the District of Columbia, Richard Leon, declared on December 16, 2013, that the mass collection of metadata of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency probably violates the fourth amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. 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) and ordered the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered. But the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his 68-page opinion the “significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues.”

However a federal judge in New York City ruled 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. U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III also ruled that Congress legally set up the program and that it does not violate anyone’s constitutional rights. The judge also concluded that the telephone data being swept up by NSA did not belong to telephone users, but to the telephone companies. He further ruled that when NSA obtains such data from the telephone companies, and then probes into it to find links between callers and potential terrorists, this further use of the data was not even a search under the Fourth Amendment. He also concluded that the controlling precedent is Smith v. Maryland: “Smith’s bedrock holding is that an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information provided to third parties,” Judge Pauley wrote. The American Civil Liberties Union declared on January 2, 2012 that it will appeal Judge Pauley's ruling that NSA bulk the phone record collection is legal. "The government has a legitimate interest in tracking the associations of suspected terrorists, but tracking those associations does not require the government to subject every citizen to permanent surveillance,” deputy ACLU legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement.

In recent years, American and British intelligence agencies conducted surveillance on more than 1,100 targets, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.

A catalog of high-tech gadgets and software developed by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) was leaked by the German news magazine Der Spiegel. 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:

Computer implants

SPARROW II - Mobile device that functions as a WLAN collection system FIREWALK - Hardware implant for collection of Gigabit Ethernet network traffic GINSU - Software that extends application persistence for the CNE (Computer Network Exploitation) implant KONGUR IRATEMONK - Replaces master boot records (MBRs) of various hard disk manufacturers SWAP - Exploits motherboard BIOS before the operating system loads WISTFULTOLL - Software implant that exploits Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to transfer data HOWLERMONKEY - Short to medium range radio frequency (RF) transceiver NIGHTSTAND - Mobile device that introduces NSA software to computers up to 8 miles (13 kilometers) away via Wireless LAN COTTONMOUTH-I - USB flash drive implant COTTONMOUTH-II - USB implant COTTONMOUTH-III - USB implant JUNIORMINT - Digital core packaged into a printed circuit board (PCB) and a flip chip MAESTRO-II - Miniaturized digital core packaged into a multi-chip module (MCM) TRINITY - Miniaturized digital core packaged into a multi-chip module (MCM) SOMBERKNAVE - Software implant for Windows XP that provides covert Internet access for the NSA's targets SURLYSPAWN - Device for keystroke logging RAGEMASTER - Hardware implant concealed in a computer's Video Graphics Array (VGA) to capture screenshots and video

Server implants and firewall implants

IRONCHEF - Software implant that functions as a permanent BIOS system DEITYBOUNCE - Software implant for insertion into Dell PowerEdge servers JETPLOW - Installs a backdoor targeting Cisco PIX and ASA firewalls HALLUXWATER - Installs a backdoor targeting Huawei's Eudemon firewalls FEEDTROUGH - Installs a backdoor targeting numerous Juniper Networks firewalls GOURMETTROUGH - Installs a backdoor targeting numerous Juniper Networks firewalls SOUFFLETROUGH - BIOS implant for Juniper SSG300 and SSG 500 series firewalls

Covert listening devices
LOUDAUTO - Covert listening device NIGHTWATCH - Device for reconstruction of signals belonging to target systems CTX4000 - Portable continuous-wave radar (CRW) unit to illuminate a target system for Dropmire collection PHOTOANGLO - Successor to the CTX4000, jointly developed by the NSA and the GCHQ TAWDRYYARD - Device that functions as a radio frequency (RF) retroreflector

Mobile phone implants and related products

PICASSO - Modified GSM handset CROSSBEAM - GSM module for commercial mobile phones CANDYGRAM - Mimics the GMS cell tower of targeted networks DROPOUTJEEP - Software implant for the iOS operating system of the iPhone GOPHERSET - Software implant for GSM subscriber identity module (SIM) cards that pulls out address books, SMS (Short Message Service) text messages, and call log information MONKEYCALENDAR - Software implant for GSM subscriber identity module (SIM) cards that pulls out geolocation information TOTECHASER - Windows CE implant that targets the Thuraya handset TOTEGHOSTLY 2.0 - Software implant for Windows Mobile capable of retrieving SMS (Short Message Service) text messages, Voicemail and contact lists, as well as turning on built-in microphones and cameras

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. This was done in close cooperation with the FBI and the CIA. NSA officials responded to the Spiegel reports with a statement, which said: "Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the front lines of enabling NSA to defend the nation and its allies. [TAO's] work is centred on computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence collection."

On 4 December 2013, The Washington Post released an internal NSA chart illustrating the extent of the agency's mass collection of mobile phone location records, which amounts to about five billion on a daily basis. The records are stored in a huge database known as FASCIA, which received over 27 terabytes of location data within seven months.

2014

January

The NSA is working to build a powerful quantum computer capable of breaking all types of encryption. The effort is part of a US$79.7 million research program known as "Penetrating Hard Targets". It involves extensive research carried out in large, shielded rooms known as Faraday cages, which are designed to prevent electromagnetic radiation from entering or leaving. Currently, the NSA is close to producing basic building blocks that will allow the agency to gain "complete quantum control on two semiconductor qubits". 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.

Aftermath

Main article: Aftermath of the global surveillance disclosure

Reactions of political leaders

Country	Government official	Quote
United States	President Barack Obama	"There is no spying on Americans" (August 7)
	White House Press Secretary Jay Carney	"They are programs that were authorized by Congress" (June 13)
	Attorney General Eric Holder	"We cannot target even foreign persons overseas without a valid foreign intelligence purpose." (June 14)
United Kingdom	Prime Minister David Cameron	"If they (the media) don't demonstrate some social responsibility it will be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act" (October 28)
	Foreign Secretary William Hague	"We take great care to balance individual privacy with our duty to safeguard the public and UK national security" (June 10)
	Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg	"You must absolutely defend the principle of secrecy for the intelligence agencies" (October 10)
Australia	Prime Minister Tony Abbott	"Every Australian governmental agency, every Australian official at home and abroad, operates in accordance with the law" (October 31)
Germany	Chancellor Angela Merkel	"A country without intelligence work would be too vulnerable." (July 10)
	Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich	"The Americans take our data privacy concerns seriously." (August)
Sweden	Foreign Minister Carl Bildt	"I am convinced that it is a national necessity for Sweden to have a well-functioning intelligence service" (December 13)

Review of intelligence agencies

Germany

In July 2013, the German government announced an extensive review of Germany's intelligence services.

United States

In August 2013, the U.S. government announced an extensive review of U.S. intelligence services.

United Kingdom

In October 2013, the British government announced an extensive review of British intelligence services.

Canada

In December 2013, the Canadian government announced an extensive review of Canada's intelligence services.

Gallery

International relations

• 
  NSA's relationship with Norway's NIS
• 
  NSA's relationship with Sweden's FRA
• 
  NSA's agreement to share data with Israel's ISNU
• 
  German BND's usage of the NSA's XKEYSCORE
• 
  NSA's relationship with Canada's CSEC
• 
  Summary of a secret meeting between the NSA and the Dutch intelligence services AIVD and MIVD

U.S. domestic federal documents

• 
  Court order demanding that Verizon hand over all metadata to NSA.
• 
  Procedures used to target Foreigners.
• 
  Procedures used to Minimize collection on US persons.
• 
  2009 OIG Draft Report on Stellar Wind.
• 
  2007 Memos by Michael Mukasey requesting Broader powers.
• 
  Presidential Policy Directive – PPD 20 Signed By Barack Obama Relating to Cyberwarfare
• 
  NSA report on privacy violations.
• 
  What's a 'privacy violation'
• 
  FISA Court finds NSA surveillance "deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds" but nonetheless recertifies it.
• 
  Targeting Rationale Guidelines
• 
  Extracts of FY 2013 Intelligence Budget, volume 1
• 
  FY 2013 Intelligence Budget, additional tables

NSA presentations

• 
  SilverZephyr Slide
• 
  Dropmire Slide.
• Documents relating to spying on the 2009 G20 Summit
  Documents relating to spying on the 2009 G20 Summit
• 
  Cover page of the PRISM presentation.
• 
  Map of global internet bandwidth.
• 
  Names of the PRISM content providers and which services they typically provide.
• 
  Dates each content provider was added to PRISM.
• 
  Flowchart of the PRISM tasking process.
• 
  PRISM dataflow.
• 
  Explanation of PRISM case names.
• 
  REPRISMFISA web application.
• Upstream and PRISM.
  Upstream and PRISM.
• 
  A week in the life of Prism
• 
  A 2008 Presentation of the XKeyscore program. (PDF, 27.26 MB)
• 
  Geopolititical Trends: Key Challenges
• 
  Geopolitical trends: Global Drivers
• 
  Benefits of contact graph analysis.
• 
  Benefits of contact graph analysis.
• 
  Contact graph.
• 
  Hops in a contact graph.
• 
  2 hop contact graph.
• 
  Spying against Enrique Peña Nieto and his associates.
• 
  Details of the process in the Nieto operation.
• 
  Emails from Nieto detailing potential cabinet picks.
• 
  Spying effort against Dilma Rousseff and her advisers.
• 
  Details of the process in the Rousseff operation (2 hop contact graph)
• 
  Details of the process in the Rousseff operation (2 hop contact graph)
• 
  Benefits of contact graph analysis.
• 
  Exploitation of Common Internet Encryption Technologies.

Exceptionally Controlled Information

According to The Guardian, Exceptionally Controlled Information (ECI) refers to a classification level higher than Snowden's top secret documents. Documents classified as ECI contain the actual identities of the following NSA commercial partners operating the global surveillance network: Artifice, Lithium and Serenade. The name of a commercial NSA partner facility known as Steelknight is classified ECI and therefore not revealed in Snowden's documents.

Comparison with previous leaks

Year	Disclosure	Size	Main source(s)	Major publisher(s)
2013	Global surveillance disclosure	1.5 million documents	Edward Snowden	The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, El País, Le Monde, L'espresso, O Globo, ProPublica, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, NRC Handelsblad, Sveriges Television
2010	U.S. Army and U.S. State Department documents	734,885 files	Chelsea (then known as Bradley) Manning	The Guardian, The New York Times. Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País, WikiLeaks The material consisted of: 1 Collateral Murder video + 91,000 Afghan War diary + 391,832 Iraq War logs + 251,287 Secret US Embassy Cables + 765 Gitmo DABs = 734,885 total.
1971	Pentagon Papers	4,100 pages	Daniel Ellsberg	The New York Times

See also

• Pentagon Papers
• United States diplomatic cables leak

External links

Media related to 2013 Mass Surveillance Disclosures at Wikimedia Commons

• "Global Surveillance. An annotated and categorized "overview of the revelations following the leaks by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. There are also some links to comments and followups". By Oslo University Library.
• "The NSA Files". The Guardian.
• Politico Staff. "NSA leaks cause flood of political problems." Politico. June 13, 2013.
• NSA inspector general report on email and internet data collection under Stellar Wind as provided by The Guardian on June 27, 2013.
• "Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, drones in exclusive RT interview (FULL VIDEO)." Russia Today. June 12, 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer. "NSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope." The Guardian. July 17, 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer. "Slew of court challenges threaten NSA's relationship with tech firms." The Guardian. Wednesday July 17, 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer and Paul Lewis. "NSA amendment's narrow defeat spurs privacy advocates for surveillance fight." The Guardian. Thursday July 25, 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer and Dan Roberts. "US embassy closures used to bolster case for NSA surveillance programs." The Guardian. Monday August 5, 2013.
• Two of the 'trips' (numbers 29 and 76) in the 2006 book, 'No Holiday', Cohen, Martin. No Holiday. New York: Disinformation Company Ltd. ISBN 978-1-932857-29-0. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help) are investigating the NSA and its activities.
• Greenwald, Glenn. "Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA." The Guardian. Sunday August 4, 2013.
• "Obama’s former adviser ridicules statement that NSA doesn’t spy on Americans." (Archive) Russia Today. August 9, 2013.
• MacAskill, Ewen. "Justice Department fails in bid to delay landmark case on NSA collection." The Guardian. Thursday July 25, 2013.
• Rushe, Dominic. "Microsoft pushes Eric Holder to lift block on public information sharing." The Guardian. Tuesday July 16, 2013.
• Perez, Evan. "Documents shed light on U.S. surveillance programs." (Archive) CNN. August 9, 2013.
• Gellman, Barton. "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds." Washington Post. Thursday August 15, 2013.
• Roberts, Dan and Robert Booth. "NSA defenders: embassy closures followed pre-9/11 levels of 'chatter'." The Guardian. Sunday August 4, 2013.
• Greenwald, Glenn. "The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all'." The Guardian. Monday July 15, 2013.
• Sanchez, Julian. "Five things Snowden leaks revealed about NSA’s original warrantless wiretaps." Ars Technica. July 9, 2013.
• Forero, Juan. "Paper reveals NSA ops in Latin America." Washington Post. July 9, 2013.
• Jabour, Bridie. "Telstra signed deal that would have allowed US spying." The Guardian. Friday July 12, 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer. "White House stays silent on renewal of NSA data collection order." The Guardian. Thursday July 18, 2013.
• Naughton, John. "Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is." The Guardian. July 28, 2013.
• Adams, Becket. "MAD MAGAZINE USES ICONIC CHARACTERS TO HIT OBAMA OVER GOV’T SURVEILLANCE." The Blaze. August 8, 2013.
• Howerton, Jason. "HERE IS THE PRO-NSA SURVEILLANCE ARGUMENT." The Blaze. June 10, 2013.
• "Edward Snowden NSA files: secret surveillance and our revelations so far – Leaked National Security Agency documents have led to several hundred Guardian stories on electronic privacy and the state" by the Guardian's James Ball on August 21, 2013
• 2013-07-29 Letter of FISA Court president Reggie B. Walton to the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick J. Leahy about certain operations of the FISA Court; among other things the process of accepting, modifying and/or rejecting surveillance measures proposed by the U.S. government, the interaction between the FISA Court and the U.S. government, the appearance of non-governmental parties before the court and the process used by the Court to consider and resolve any instances where the government entities notifies the court of compliance concerns with any of the FISA authorities.
• "The Spy Files". Wikileaks. December 1, 2011. A collection of documents relating to surveillance.
  • "The Spy Files". Wikileaks. December 8, 2011. Part 2 of the above.
  • "Spy Files 3". Wikileaks. September 4, 2013. Part 3 of the above.
• "Veja os documentos ultrassecretos que comprovam espionagem a Dilma" (in Portuguese). September 2, 2013. Retrieved September 4, 2013. Documents relating to the surveillance against Dilma Roussef and Enrique Peña Nieto
• NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure - The NSA has huge capabilities – and if it wants in to your computer, it's in. With that in mind, here are five ways to stay safe by The Guardian's Bruce Schneier on September 5, 2013.
• 2014-01-04 Al Jazeera's "Listening Post - The Snowden saga: Spies, secrets and security - A look back at the biggest media story of 2013 - Edward Snowden and the NSA surveillance programme." which in its first part of the broadcast retells the global surveillance in the year 2013 and in its second part shows an interview former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker.