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9/11 inside the White House emergency bunker
On July 24, the US National Archives released a series of 356 never-before-seen photos, most of them taken on September 11, 2001 inside the emergency bunker under the White House.The bunker is...
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NSA's Legal Authorities
Since the start of the Snowden-revelations, we not only learned about the various collection programs and systems of the National Security Agency (NSA), but also about the various legal authorities...
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New details about the selectors NSA provided to BND
(Updated: November 11, 2015)Since last Spring, the German parliamentary commission investigating NSA spying is trying to find out whether the Americans secretly tried to spy on German and European...
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Unnoticed leak answers and raises questions about operation Eikonal
(Last edited: November 23, 2015)Almost unnoticed, the Austrian member of parliament Peter Pilz recently disclosed new information about operation Eikonal, under which NSA and BND cooperated in tapping...
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How NSA targeted the Venezuelan oil company PdVSA
There aren't many new revelations from the Snowden-documents anymore, but recently an NSA document was published telling how the agency prepared the interception of communications from the Venezuelan...
View ArticleLeaked documents that were not attributed to Snowden
(Last edited: December 30, 2015)Since June 2013, numerous top secret documents from the American signals intelligence agency NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ have been disclosed. The overwhelming...
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Section 215 bulk telephone records and the MAINWAY database
One of the most controversial NSA programs was the bulk collection of domestic telepone records (metadata) under authority of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The Snowden revelations provided hardly...
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How NSA contact chaining combines domestic and foreign phone records
(Updated: February 18, 2016)In the previous posting we saw that the domestic telephone records, which NSA collected under authority of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (internally referred to as...
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A look at the latest French laws on intelligence collection
For the second time we have an article written in cooperation with the French weblog about intelligence and defence Zone d'Intérêt:IntroductionOver the last year, The French parliament passed new laws...
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Something about the use of selectors: correlations and equations
The Snowden revelations made people familiar with what NSA calls "selectors": phone numbers, e-mail addresses and a whole range of similar groups of characters that can be used to identify a particular...
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The phones of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
One of the key players during the Snowden affair was Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. He is responsible for coordinating all 16 American intelligence agencies, a role which is reflected...
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German journalists about working with the Snowden documents
Last Monday, the website The Intercept started publishing larger batches of documents from the Snowden trove, so they can now also be examined by the public. It's a new phase after previously documents...
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E-mails from inside the NSA bureaucracy
Earlier this month, the NSA declassified a huge set of internal e-mails, following FOIA-requests about the issue of whether Edward Snowden had raised concerns about the NSA's surveillance programs...
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Is the Shadow Brokers leak the latest in a series?
(Updated: August 24, 2016)Earlier this week, a group or an individual called the Shadow Brokers published a large set of files containing the computer code for hacking tools. They were said to be from...
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Secret report reveals: German BND also uses XKEYSCORE for data collection
(Updated: September 23, 2016)Over the past few years we learned a lot about Germany's foreign intelligence service BND, although not from leaks, but from the public hearings of the parliamentary...
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With NSA contractor Martin arrested, other leakers may still be at large
(Latest UPDATE: October 21, 2016)Earlier this month we learned the name of a second person who stole top secret documents from the US National Security Agency (NSA). After Edward Snowden admitted doing...
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Data sharing systems used within the Five Eyes partnership
From the Snowden revelations, the general public learned about the Five Eyes partnership between the signals intelligence agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New...
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Wikileaks publishes classified documents from inside German NSA inquiry...
On December 1, Wikileaks published 90 gigabytes of classified documents from the German parliamentary commission that investigates NSA spying and the cooperation between NSA and the German foreign...
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A perspective on the new Dutch intelligence law
Since the Snowden-revelations, several countries adopted new laws governing their (signals) intelligence agencies, but instead of restricting the collection capabilities, they rather expand them....
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Obama used a cybersecurity link for the first time to warn Russia
Shortly before the recent US presidential election, a dedicated cybersecurity hotline with Moscow was used by president Obama to warn the Russian government not to interfere with the election process...
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