2013 global surveillance disclosures

In mid-2013, several news outlets reported that the United States, with the aid of Australia and New Zealand, have been spying on domestic and international communications on a much larger scale than previously thought. It was later revealed that France and the United Kingdom have also been spying.

Based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, these media reports revealed that espionage activities conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies targeted not only foreign countries but also U.S. citizens as well as U.S. allies from NATO and the European Union.

Snowden had made initial contact with journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who also brought in Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman. They met with Snowden in Hong Kong and, beginning on 6 June 2013, began publishing the revelations, roughly on a daily basis, mostly in the Guardian newspaper.

Summary of NSA spying programs

On 6 June 2013, Britain's The Guardian newspaper began publishing a series of revelations by an as yet unknown American spy, revealed several days later to be ex-CIA and ex-NSA-contracted systems analyst Edward Snowden. In over a month of publications, it became clear that the NSA operates a complex web of spying programs which allow it to intercept internet and telephone conversations from over a billion users from dozens of countries around the world. Specific revelations have been made about China, the European Union, Latin America, Iran and Pakistan, and Australia and New Zealand, however the published documentation reveals that many of the programs indiscriminately collect bulk information directly from central servers and internet backbones, which almost invariably carry and reroute information from distant countries.

Due to this central server and backbone monitoring, many of the programs overlap and interrelate among one another. These programs are often done with the assistance of US entities such as the DOJ and the FBI, are sanctioned by US laws such as the FISA Amendments Act, and the necessary court orders for them are signed by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In addition to this, many of the NSA's programs are directly aided by national and foreign intelligence services, Britain's GCHQ and Australia's DSD, as well as by large private telecommunications and internet corporations, such as Verizon, Telstra, Google and Facebook.

The programs include –

• PRISM – Cooperation between the NSA and internet companies, whereby the companies allow the NSA access (whether direct or indirect is disputed) to their servers.

• Boundless Informant – the computer program that physically performs the data collection.

• X-Keyscore – a program which allows searching collected data in a variety of ways.

• Dropmire – a program that specifically targets foreign embassies and diplomats

• Fairview – a program that targets mobile phone usage (particularly text messages) in foreign countries.

• Upstream and Tempora – collecting data from fiber-optic cables and internet backbones.

• MAINWAY (call records), Main Core (financial records) – storing the collected data

• Stellar Wind – mining the collected data

• ECHELON – intercepts commercial satellite trunk communications by all of the Five Eyes signatories

• Turbulence – includes cyber-warfare capabilities, such as targeting enemies with malware

• Insider Threat Program – policy requiring federal employees to report "high-risk persons or behaviors" from among co-workers, as well as to punish those who fail to report such colleagues.

Several programs have been mentioned in passing during Snowden's revelations, but no information on them save for their names is currently available. These include – Special Source Operations (included as a logo on most of the released presentation slides, apparently responsible for all programs which collaborate with corporate entities), ThinThread, Nucleon (voice), Pinwale (video), Marina (internet records), Stormbrew, Blarney, Oakstar, Pintaura (automates traffic flow), TrafficThief, Scissors and Protocol Exploitation (sort data types for analysis), Fallout and Conveyance (provide filtering) ^{(All appear in the slides in the following reference)}; ShellTrumpet (a metadata program targeting international communications), MoonlightPath and Spinneret; EvilOlive (collection of internet traffic and data), SilverZephyr and Steel Knight.

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits the search or seizure of a person's "papers or effects" without a court-ordered warrant based on probable cause that the person in question is planning or is guilty of an actual crime, and particularly describing what is to be seized. However, the US government has made strenuous efforts to prevent federal courts from ruling on whether the NSA's surveillance efforts comply with the Fourth Amendment.

Presentation Slides leaked by Edward Snowden

• The Presentation Slides
• 
  Cover page of the PRISM presentation.
• 
  Map of global internet bandwidth.
• 
  Names of the PRISM content providers and what services are typically returned to PRISM.
• 
  Dates each content provider joined PRISM.
• 
  Flowchart of the PRISM tasking process.
• 
  PRISM dataflow.
• 
  Explanation of PRISM case names.
• 
  REPRISMFISA web application.
• Upstream and PRISM.
  Upstream and PRISM.
• 
  A 2008 Presentation of the XKeyscore program.

Media reports based on documents provided by Edward Snowden

News outlet	Type of media	Summary of disclosures
The Guardian	British daily newspaper	The Guardian and the Washington Post both reported that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring Internet traffic in realtime via PRISM. In addition, the Guardian reported that: The NSA collected data from over 120 million Verizon subscribers (This was the very first revelation, published on 6 June) The NSA collected global electronic information via Boundless Informant During the 2009 G-20 London Summit, the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had intercepted the communications of foreign diplomats. The GCHQ has been intercepting and storing mass quantities of fiber-optic traffic via Tempora The NSA collected from 2001 to 2011 via Stellar Wind vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, and after the program end of Stellar Wind due to operational and resource reasons other programs such as ShellTrumpet. A method of bugging encrypted fax machines used at an EU embassy is codenamed Dropmire 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.” The Guardian revealed that XKeyscore allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals. 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 Washington Post	U.S. daily newspaper	PRISM revelation, simultaneously with The Guardian. Upstream revelation.
South China Morning Post	English language newspaper based in Hong Kong	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 The Asian fiber-optic network operator Pacnet
Der Spiegel	German news magazine	Documents provided by Edward Snowden and seen by Der Spiegel revealed that 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 Only Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK are explicitly exempted from NSA attacks, whose main target in the EU is Germany. Snowden also confirmed that Stuxnet was cooperatively developed by the United States and Israel. The NSA gave the German intelligence agencies BND and BfV access to X-Keyscore.
O Globo	Brazilian newspaper	The United States spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilians. Australia and New Zealand have been aiding the United States in their surveillance program.
Le Monde	French newspaper	In a report unrelated to Edward Snowden, the paper revealed thet France's DGSE was also undertaking mass surveillance, which it described as "illegal and outside any serious control".
Süddeutsche Zeitung	German newspaper	Documents provided by Edward Snowden and seen by Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed that several telecom operators have played a key role in helping the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) tap onto worldwide fiber-optic communications. These 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 for. Some of them were subsequently rewarded by the GCHQ for spying on their own customers.

Fallout

See also: Edward Snowden § Reactions

U.S. President Barack Obama on the importance of surveillance: "...They help us prevent terrorist attacks. And the modest encroachments on the privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net, it was worth us doing..."

UK Defence officials issued a confidential DA-Notice to the BBC and other media asking the media to refrain from running further stories related to surveillance leaks including US PRISM programme and the British involvement therein. The US Army similarly restricted access to the Guardian website in order to prevent an unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

U.S. President Barack Obama asserted that the American public had no cause for concern because "nobody is listening to your telephone calls".

On 21 June 2013, the Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper issued an apology for giving false testimony under oath to the United States Congress, which is a felony under 18 USC s. 1001. Earlier in March that year, Clapper had denied that the NSA was collecting any type of data from U.S. citizens. In his letter of apology, Clapper wrote that he had focused on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and therefore, he "simply didn't think" about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which justifies the mass collection of telephone data from U.S. citizens. Clapper said: "My response was clearly erroneous—for which I apologize".

Counter-terrorism and national security

Keith B. Alexander, the director of the NSA, asserted that these media leaks have caused "significant" and "irreversible" damage to the national security of the United States and this "irresponsible" release of classified information will have a "long-term detrimental" impact on the intelligence community's ability to detect future attacks. Furthermore, these leaks have "inflamed and sensationalized" the work that the intelligence community does lawfully under "strict oversight and compliance".

U.S. government officials have also claimed that terrorists are trying to change their tactics as a result of these media leaks.

Impact on foreign relations

These media leaks have damaged the bilateral relations of the United States with several of its economic partners:

• Relations with China: Whitehouse spokesman Jay Carney expressed anger at the Hong Kong government's decision to release Edward Snowden, damaging Sino-American relations.

• Relations with the European Union: The European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström, wrote that "mutual trust and confidence have been seriously eroded and I expect the U.S. to do all that it can to restore them".

Amash/Conyers Amendment

In response to the information release by Snowden, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. If passed, the amendment "would curtail the ongoing dragnet collection and storage of the personal records of innocent Americans." The House rejected the amendment by a vote of 205-217. An analysis indicates that those who voted against the amendment received 122% more in campaign contributions from defense contractors than those who voted in favor of it. Template:List of votes on the Amash/Conyers Amendment

See also

• Edward Snowden
• NSA warrantless surveillance (2001–07)
• List of government surveillance projects
• 2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters
• Spying on United Nations leaders by United States diplomats

Further reading

• "The NSA Files". The Guardian.
• Politico Staff. "NSA leaks cause flood of political problems." Politico. 13 June 2013.
• NSA inspector general report on email and internet data collection under Stellar Wind as provided by The Guardian on 27 June 2013.
• "Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, drones in exclusive RT interview (FULL VIDEO)." Russia Today. 12 June 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer. "NSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope." The Guardian. 17 July 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer. "Slew of court challenges threaten NSA's relationship with tech firms." The Guardian. Wednesday 17 July 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer and Paul Lewis. "NSA amendment's narrow defeat spurs privacy advocates for surveillance fight." The Guardian. Thursday 25 July 2013.
• MacAskill, Ewen. "Justice Department fails in bid to delay landmark case on NSA collection." The Guardian. Thursday 25 July 2013.
• Rushe, Dominic. "Microsoft pushes Eric Holder to lift block on public information sharing." The Guardian. Tuesday 16 July 2013.
• Greenwald, Glenn. "The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all'." The Guardian. Monday 15 July 2013.
• Sanchez, Julian. "Five things Snowden leaks revealed about NSA’s original warrantless wiretaps." Ars Technica. 9 July 2013.
• Forero, Juan. "Paper reveals NSA ops in Latin America." Washington Post. 9 July 2013.
• Jabour, Bridie. "Telstra signed deal that would have allowed US spying." The Guardian. Friday 12 July 2013.
• Ackerman, Spencer. "White House stays silent on renewal of NSA data collection order." The Guardian. Thursday 18 July 2013.
• Naughton, John. "Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is." The Guardian. July 28, 2013.