Timeline masters of the internet

This page contains links gathered and shared by anonymii over four years (crowdsourced as it were) on "things": told and leaked stories and whistle spit. People and communities use stories to understand the world and our place in it. These stories are embedded with power - the power to explain and justify the status quo as well as the power to make change imaginable and urgent. A narrative analysis of power encourages us to ask: Which stories define cultural norms? Where did these stories come from? Whose stories were ignored or erased to create these norms? And, most urgently, what new stories can we tell to help create the world we desire?

This timeline serves awareness of the power of storytelling, retrospective exercises (connecting dots), further research and investigation, propaganda exercises (detecting and shredding fallacious arguments), threat modeling ("quick and dirty" requires knowledge ready at hand), finding moves aiding survival of the greatest scope of life to a greater degree than any associated destruction, and other weird stuff like that, so if you add a story, we love it!

Masters of the internet

Even during the 1970s, the rhetoric of “free flow of information” had long functioned as a central tenet of US foreign policy. During the era of decolonisation and cold war the doctrine purported to be a shining beacon, lighting the world’s way to emancipation from imperialism and state repression. Today it continues to paint deep-seated economic and strategic interests in an appealing language of universal human rights. “Internet freedom”, “freedom to connect”, “net freedom” — terms circulated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Google executives together in the run-up to the WCIT — are today’s version of the longstanding “free flow” precept. But just as before, “Internet freedom” is a red herring (see Logical fallacies in Propaganda). Calculatingly manipulative, it tells us to entrust a fundamental human right to a pair of powerfully self-interested social actors: corporations and states.

The making of the US surveillance state, 1898-2020

The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020: The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed.

Interception capabilities 2000

Interception Capabilities 2000: eport to the Director General for Research of the European Parliament (Scientific and Technical Options Assessment programme office) on the development of surveillance technology and risk of abuse of economic information. This study considers the state of the art in Communications intelligence (Comint) of automated processing for intelligence purposes of intercepted broadband multi-language leased or common carrier systems, and its applicability to Comint targeting and selection, including speech recognition.

Glimpses of planned information operations

Propaganda for the middle east

In 2005 the BBC reports that the US military is planning to win the hearts of young people in the Middle East by publishing a new comic in order to "achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East" .

Fight the net

In 2006 the BBC reveals US plans to 'fight the net': A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks .

The FBI wiretap net

August 2007: The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

Bloggers on guard

The Raw Story reports in 2007 that CENTCOM sent emails to "bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information" .

In 2009 the US Air Force releases ‘Counter-Blog’ marching orders to its airmen as part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force"

Wargame simulations

More alarming seems to be the article from the Register on wargame simulations: Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale informing us that the US DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and artificial reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda .

Law enforcement technical forum

Packeteer is a tool to decode captured data from any data network (e.g. e-mails, webpages, images, audio files, etc.) plus an XML file describing all the data. Coolminer is an internally developed software interface that configures and displays processed data in intelligible form. [...] Over the course of the last two years, DITU centralized two processing centers that load balance the work. A third processing center is coming online soon. [...] State and local law enforcement remains responsible for original evidence storage. The FBI will pull copied collected data to the processor. And more such enlightening delicious little tidbits.

The secret eu surveillance plan that wasn't

CLEAN IT: the secret EU surveillance plan that wasn't: There are elements in Europe who would dearly like to see the CLEAN IT wish list put into practice, but we must distinguish between transnational talking shops, EU working groups and draft EU policy.

Snowden leaks

PRISM

June 6, 2013: First Snowden leak containing the PRISM slides. All known slides are shown in an article by Top Level Communications on what is known about NSA's PRISM program. If new slides of this PRISM presentation become available, they will be added. . PRISM is not for mass surveillance but for collecting communications of specifically identified targets. NSA also has no "direct access" to the servers of companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Google. A unit of the FBI picks up the data and the NSA does the analysis.

Overseas target list

June 7, 2013: Second Snowden leak on Obama ordering his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up an overseas target list for cyber-attacks. The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) "can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging".

It says the government will "identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power".

The directive also contemplates the possible use of cyber actions inside the US, though it specifies that no such domestic operations can be conducted without the prior order of the president, except in cases of emergency.

Boundless Informant

June 8, 2013: Apparently the NSA has a tool that records and analyzes all the flow of data that the spy agency collects around the world, a global data-mining software that details exactly how much intelligence, and of what type, has been collected from every country in the world. That is "Boundless Informant." The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country, according to an NSA factsheet on the program.

Top Level Communications notes that Screenshots from BOUNDLESSINFORMANT can be misleading.

US spies on Hong Kong and Chinese citizens

June 14, 2013: Edward Snowden: US government has been hacking Hong Kong and China for years.

There is a NSA/CIA hybrid agency?

The media is quoting a number of intelligence “insiders” who are questioning NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s involvement in National Security Agency (NSA) signals intelligence and meta-data mining programs like PRISM and CIA human intelligence (HUMINT) operations.

However, the U.S. intelligence “insiders” may be trying their best to cover up the operations of a little-known hybrid NSA-CIA organizations known as the Special Collection Service (SCS), known internally at NSA as “F6,” and which is headquartered in Beltsville, Maryland in what appears to be a normal office building with a sign bearing the letters “CSSG” at its front driveway off of Springfield Road. Adjacent to the CSSG building is the State Department’s Beltsville Communications Annex, known internally at the State Department as SA-26 and part of the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service, which also handles encrypted communications to CIA stations around the world.

Snowden leaks

US and Britain monitor foreign diplomats

June 16, 2013: GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20 summits: Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

June 17, 2013: G20 summit: NSA targeted Russian president Medvedev in London: American spies based in the UK intercepted the top-secret communications of the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during his visit to Britain for the G20 summit in London, leaked documents reveal.

June 16, 2013: Read extracts from the leaked documents describing the agency's 'recent successes'.

Top secret rules

June 20, 2013: The top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant: Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant. The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used.

GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables

June 21, 2013: GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications: Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate. One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

Stellar wind

June 27, 2013 Guardian: NSA inspector general report on email and internet data collection under Stellar Wind: Top-secret draft report from 2009 by the NSA's inspector general shows development of 'collection of bulk internet metadata' under program launched under Bush.

Spying on europeans

June 29, 2013 Der Spiegel: Information shows that America's National Security Agency (NSA) not only conducted online surveillance of European citizens, but also appears to have specifically targeted buildings housing European Union institutions. A "top secret" 2010 document describes how the secret service attacked the EU's diplomatic representation in Washington.

The document suggests that in addition to installing bugs in the building in downtown Washington, DC, the European Union representation's computer network was also infiltrated. In this way, the Americans were able to access discussions in EU rooms as well as emails and internal documents on computers.

June 30, 2013 Der Spiegel: Internal NSA statistics indicate that the agency stores data from around half a billion communications connections in Germany each month. This data includes telephone calls, emails, mobile-phone text messages and chat transcripts. The metadata -- or information about which call or data connections were made and when -- is then stored at the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, near Washington, DC.

Big brother in france

July 4, 2013: Le Monde: Si les révélations sur le programme d'espionnage américain Prism ont provoqué un concert d'indignation en Europe, la France, elle, n'a que faiblement protesté. Pour deux excellentes raisons : Paris était déjà au courant. Et fait la même chose.

Le Monde est en mesure de révéler que la Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE, les services spéciaux) collecte systématiquement les signaux électromagnétiques émis par les ordinateurs ou les téléphones en France, tout comme les flux entre les Français et l'étranger : la totalité de nos communications sont espionnées. L'ensemble des mails, des SMS, des relevés d'appels téléphoniques, des accès à Facebook, Twitter, sont ensuite stockés pendant des années.

Big brother in australia

July 6, 2013: Classified US National Security Agency maps leaked by Mr Snowden and published by US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Brazilian O Globo newspaper reveal the locations of dozens of US and allied signals intelligence collection sites that contribute to interception of telecommunications and internet traffic worldwide.

The US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and three Australian Signals Directorate facilities: the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Facility at Geraldton and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra are among contributors to the NSA's collection program codenamed X-Keyscore.

Big brother in latin america

July 6, 2013, O Globo: Os documentos da NSA são eloquentes. O Brasil, com extensas redes públicas e privadas digitalizadas, operadas por grandes companhias de telecomunicações e de internet, aparece destacado em mapas da agência americana como alvo prioritário no tráfego de telefonia e dados (origem e destino), ao lado de nações como China, Rússia, Irã e Paquistão. É incerto o número de pessoas e empresas espionadas no Brasil. Mas há evidências de que o volume de dados capturados pelo sistema de filtragem nas redes locais de telefonia e internet é constante e em grande escala.

Criada há 61 anos, na Guerra Fria, a NSA tem como tarefa espionar comunicações de outros países, decifrando códigos governamentais. Dedica-se, também, a desenvolver sistemas de criptografia para o governo.

July 6, 2013, O Globo: Os Estados Unidos têm programas de espionagem e rastreamento funcionando em vários outros países da América Latina, além do Brasil. Documentos sigilosos da Agência de Segurança Nacional (NSA, na sigla em inglês) aos quais o GLOBO teve acesso mostram que situações similares ocorrem no México, Venezuela, Argentina, Colômbia e Equador, entre outros.

Um dos aspectos que se destaca nos documentos é que, de acordo com eles, os Estados Unidos parecem não estar interessados apenas em assuntos militares, mas também em segredos comerciais -“petróleo” na Venezuela e “energia” no México, segundo uma listagem produzida pela NSA no primeiro semestre deste ano (veja acima).

Explaining the PRISM data-collection program

July 10, 2013: The top-secret PRISM program allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from nine Internet companies to a wide range of digital information, including e-mails and stored data, on foreign targets operating outside the United States. The program is court-approved but does not require individual warrants. Instead, it operates under a broader authorization from federal judges who oversee the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Some documents describing the program were among the first documents Snowden leaked. The newly released documents give additional details about how the program operates, including the levels of review and supervisory control at the NSA and FBI. The documents also show how the program interacts with the Internet companies.

The CIA’s new black bag is digital

The CIA’s clandestine service is now conducting these sorts of black bag operations on behalf of the NSA, but at a tempo not seen since the height of the Cold War. Moreover, these missions, as well as a series of parallel signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection operations conducted by the CIA’s Office of Technical Collection, have proven to be instrumental in facilitating and improving the NSA’s SIGINT collection efforts in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Over the past decade specially-trained CIA clandestine operators have mounted over one hundred extremely sensitive black bag jobs designed to penetrate foreign government and military communications and computer systems, as well as the computer systems of some of the world’s largest foreign multinational corporations. Spyware software has been secretly planted in computer servers; secure telephone lines have been bugged; fiber optic cables, data switching centers and telephone exchanges have been tapped; and computer backup tapes and disks have been stolen or surreptitiously copied in these operations. In other words, the CIA has become instrumental in setting up the shadowy surveillance dragnet that has now been thrown into public view. Sources within the U.S. intelligence community confirm that since 9/11, CIA clandestine operations have given the NSA access to a number of new and critically important targets around the world, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, as well as the Middle East, the Near East, and South Asia. (I’m not aware of any such operations here on U.S. soil.)

Snowden leaks

German intelligence used NSA spy program

July 20, 2013, Der Spiegel: Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and its domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), used a spying program of the American National Security Agency (NSA). The documents show that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was equipped with a program called XKeyScore intended to "expand their ability to support NSA as we jointly prosecute CT (counterterrorism) targets." The BND is tasked with instructing the domestic intelligence agency on how to use the program, the documents say.

According to an internal NSA presentation from 2008, the program is a productive espionage tool. Starting with the metadata -- or information about which data connections were made and when -- it is able, for instance, to retroactively reveal any terms the target person has typed into a search engine, the documents show. In addition, the system is able to receive a "full take" of all unfiltered data over a period of several days -- including, at least in part, the content of communications.

This is relevant from a German perspective, because the documents show that of the up to 500 million data connections from Germany accessed monthly by the NSA, a major part is collected with XKeyScore (for instance, around 180 million in December 2012). The BND and BfV, when contacted by Spiegel, would not discuss the espionage tool. The NSA, as well, declined to comment, referring instead to the words of US President Barack Obama during his visit to Berlin and saying there was nothing to add.

XKeyscore

July 31, 2013, Der Spiegel: A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

NSA funding GCHQ

August 1, 2013, The Guardian: The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands. "GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight," a GCHQ strategy briefing said.

The funding underlines the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency. But it will raise fears about the hold Washington has over the UK's biggest and most important intelligence agency, and whether Britain's dependency on the NSA has become too great.

Lavabit and Silent Circle shut down

August 8, 2013: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked details of the NSA's controversial PRISM surveillance program, reportedly used a secure email service called Lavabit to send messages from Russia. Now, Lavabit has abruptly shut down, in what its owner says was a difficult decision. Ladar Levison says he's shutting down the service to avoid becoming "complicit in crimes against the American people."

August 8, 2013: “We knew USG would come after us”. That’s why Silent Circle CEO Michael Janke tells TechCrunch his company shut down its Silent Mail encrypted email service. It hadn’t been told to provide data to the government, but after Lavabit shut down today rather than be “complicit” with NSA spying, Silent Circle told customers it has killed off Silent Mail rather than risk their privacy.

The Silent Circle blog posts explains “We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now.” It’s especially damning considering Silent Circle’s co-founder and president is Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of widely-used email encryption program Pretty Good Privacy.

Snowden leaks

Audit finds NSA repeatedly broke privacy law

August 15, 2013: The US National Security Agency violated privacy laws and operated outside its legal authority thousands of times each year after Congress expanded the reach of the agency's power in 2008, according an internal audit acquired by The Washington Post. An NSA audit dated May 2012 that was provided to the newspaper by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden earlier this summer detailed 2,776 incidents during the previous year in which the agency had unlawfully collected, accessed or distributed legally protected communications, the Post reported Thursday. .

NSA illegally collected thousands of US emails annually

August 21, 2013: The National Security Agency (NSA) declassified three secret court opinions Wednesday showing how in one of its surveillance programs it scooped up as many as 56,000 emails and other communications by Americans not connected to terrorism annually over three years. This latest revelation comes amid growing criticism from members of Congress and privacy rights groups about the far-reaching U.S. intelligence apparatus.

The opinions, which were authorized to be released by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, showed that when the NSA reported its inadvertent gathering of American-based Internet traffic to the court in 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the agency to find ways to limit what it collects and how long it keeps it.

Attempt at discrediting Snowden

August 23, 2013: The Independent understands that The Guardian agreed to the Government’s request not to publish any material contained in the Snowden documents that could damage national security. [...] But there are fears in Government that Mr Greenwald – who still has access to the files – could attempt to release damaging information.

Mr. Greenwald replies via the Guardian: The NSA whistleblower says: 'I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent'

Snowden leaks

the Internet as a theater of spying, sabotage and war

August 29, 2013: Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked the United States intelligence budget for the 2013 fiscal year to The Washington Post Thursday, revealing that U.S. spy agencies are unable to uncover what The Post calls "blind spots," where information on questions of national security remains sparse.

Despite massive spending and a broad network of surveillance and international espionage facilities, the budget reportedly explains that many key national security questions continue to elude the U.S. intelligence community. Intel on biological and chemical weapons is thin, more than a week after an alleged chemical weapons attack in Damascus may have killed as many as 1,300 people.

August 30, 2013: U.S. intelligence services carried out 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, the leading edge of a clandestine campaign that embraces the Internet as a theater of spying, sabotage and war, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Washington Post.

That disclosure, in a classified intelligence budget provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, provides new evidence that the Obama administration’s growing ranks of cyberwarriors infiltrate and disrupt foreign computer networks.

NSA Spied on al jazeera communications

August 31, 2013: [...] In addition to cracking the airline reservation services for Russian airline Aeroflot, accessing "Al Jazeera broadcasting internal communication" was listed as a "notable success," the document shows. The NSA said these selected targets had "high potential as sources of intelligence."

The encrypted information was forwarded to the responsible NSA departments for further analysis, according to the document, which did not reveal to what extent the intelligence agency spied on journalists or managers of the media company, or whether the surveillance is ongoing.

Previous documents have not specified that the media were spied on by the NSA. But as more information emerges, the massive scope of the organization's international surveillance of telephone and Internet communication continues to grow.

Pakistan as target

September 1, 2013: The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaeda, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

No other nation draws as much scrutiny across so many categories of national security concern.

A 178-page summary of the U.S. intelligence community’s “black budget” shows that the United States has ramped up its surveillance of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, cites previously undisclosed concerns about biological and chemical sites there, and details efforts to assess the loyalties of counter­terrorism sources recruited by the CIA.

Brazil and mexico

September 1, 2013: The NSA spied on Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and Mexican president Peña Nieto (then a candidate). The agency pulled the leader's communications from its massive, full-take databases using the Mainway, Association and Dishfire programs.

September 2, 2013: One of the prime targets of American spies in Brazil is far away from the center of power – out at sea, deep beneath the waves. Brazilian oil. The internal computer network of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant partly owned by the state, has been under surveillance by the NSA, the National Security Agency of the United States. [...] These new disclosures contradict statements by the NSA denying espionage for economic purposes.

NSA's TAO Unit

December 29, 2013: The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency’s top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting.

ANT division catalog of exploits for nearly every major software/hardware/firmware

December 30, 2013: After years of speculation that electronics can be accessed by intelligence agencies through a back door, an internal NSA catalog reveals that such methods already exist for numerous end-user devices.

The death of irony

University of Penn’s Secret Meetings on Secret Surveillance Law: [...] She soon passes me off to another attendee: the ACLU’s Alex Abdo.

"There’s a non-attribution agreement that applies, a 'Chatham House Rule' that people here are talking about," Alex Abdo tells me. Finally, we’re getting somewhere.

Abdo is an ACLU staff attorney and participant in that organization’s National Security Project. He arrived here this morning after doing battle with the National Security Agency in U.S. District Court in Lower Manhattan the day before. Abdo is also a conference participant. At moments during our conversation, he seems embarrassed when I press him on the absurdly-ironic secrecy cloaking a conference whose very theme ostensibly seeks to take a critical look at Intelligence Community obfuscation. Hell, even several participants (including Dr. Hans Blix) during a 2006 UK conference on freedom of information and the Iraq War scoffed at invoking the Chatham House rule.

Snowden leaks

Cover up program used to investigate americans

August 2013: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

Flying Pig

September 2013: There have been rumors of the NSA and others using those kinds of MITM attacks, but to have it confirmed that they're doing them against the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft is a big deal -- and something I would imagine does not make any of those three companies particularly happy. As Ryan Gallagher notes: in some cases GCHQ and the NSA appear to have taken a more aggressive and controversial route—on at least one occasion bypassing the need to approach Google directly by performing a man-in-the-middle attack to impersonate Google security certificates. One document published by Fantastico, apparently taken from an NSA presentation that also contains some GCHQ slides, describes “how the attack was done” to apparently snoop on SSL traffic. The document illustrates with a diagram how one of the agencies appears to have hacked into a target’s Internet router and covertly redirected targeted Google traffic using a fake security certificate so it could intercept the information in unencrypted format.

Mike Masnick: Schneier also notes that this is basically the same technique the Chinese have used for their Great Firewall. In other words, the complicit nature of the telcos in basically giving the NSA and GCHQ incredibly privileged access to the backbone is part of what allows them to conduct those kinds of man-in-the-middle attacks. It still amazes me that there isn't more outrage over the role of the major telcos in all of this.

NSA attacking Tor

October 2013: The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA's application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world.

According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The trick identified Tor users on the internet and then executes an attack against their Firefox web browser. The NSA refers to these capabilities as CNE, or computer network exploitation.

Snowden leaks

Meet the spies doing the NSA’s dirty work

November 2013: With every fresh leak, the world learns more about the U.S. National Security Agency’s massive and controversial surveillance apparatus. Lost in the commotion has been the story of the NSA’s indispensable partner in its global spying operations: an obscure, clandestine unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that, even for a surveillance agency, keeps a low profile. [...] But the FBI is no mere errand boy for the United States’ biggest intelligence agency. It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies — an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned. The heart of the FBI’s signals intelligence activities is an obscure organization called the Data Intercept Technology Unit, or DITU (pronounced DEE-too). The handful of news articles that mentioned it prior to revelations of NSA surveillance this summer did so mostly in passing. It has barely been discussed in congressional testimony. An NSA PowerPoint presentation given to journalists by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden hints at DITU’s pivotal role in the NSA’s Prism system — it appears as a nondescript box on a flowchart showing how the NSA "task[s]" information to be collected, which is then gathered and delivered by the DITU.

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The ACLU created Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data.

Multistakeholder global (internet) governance?

The multistakeholder model, neo-liberalism and global (internet) governance

Gurstein writes in March 2014: What is new and somewhat startling is the full court press by the US government (USG) and its allies and acolytes among the corporate, technical and civil society participants in Internet Governance discussions to extend the use of the highly locally adapted versions of the MS model. The intent is to move the use of the MS model from the quite narrow and technical areas where it has achieved a considerable degree of success towards becoming the fundamental and effectively, only, basis on which such Internet Governance discussions are to be allowed to go forward (as per the USG’s statement concerning the transfer of the DNS management function). Notably as well "multistakeholderism" seems to have replaced "Internet Freedom" as the mobilizing Internet meme of choice ("Internet Freedom" having been somewhat discredited by post-Snowden associations of the "Internet Freedom" meme with the freedom of the USG –to "surveille", "sabotage", and "subvert" at will via the Internet).

Domain name expansion signals political shift of the internet

More than 1,000 new generic top-level domain names – the part of an internet address that comes after the “dot” – are being rolled out by the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It’s a move that will change how the internet as we know it looks and feels and has significant political implications to boot.

Surveillance is about control, not security

2014, NSA Surveillance is about Control & Leverage, not Security: For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line — like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.

Snowden leaks

Meet the muslim-american leaders the FBI have been spying on

The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies.

Top Level Communications notes that the document that was published contains no evidence of any involvement of the NSA in this particular case: Everything indicates that it was actually an FBI operation, so it seems not justified to have NSA mentioned in the article.

FBI and PRISM

January 2015: The National Security Agency isn’t the only government organization involved with the controversial PRISM program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in June 2013. A newly declassified report reveals that the FBI has also gradually increased its involvement with the search, chat, and email collection program. The report, which still features many redactions, was released by the Justice Department as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought against it by the Times. It details the FBI’s increasing interest in PRISM, expanding the Bureau’s initial role as a watchdog meant to ensure Americans’ accounts weren’t scooped up, to an active participant in the program.

Hackers create spy plug inspired by the NSA's surveillance kit

Leaked documents from the NSA recently revealed a covert USB stick that could be used to target secure, offline networks. But the device costs a staggering $20,000 (£13,200). Now, a team of hackers has created its own version of the surveillance kit using a cheap circuit board and other parts that total just $20 (£13).

DEA operations exposed

April 8, 2015: Rights group sues DEA over bulk collection of phone records: Opening another front in the legal challenges to U.S. government surveillance, a human rights group has sued the Drug Enforcement Administration for collecting bulk records of Americans' telephone calls to some foreign countries.

Lawyers for Human Rights Watch filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. The lawsuit asks a judge to declare unlawful the DEA program, which ended in September 2013 after about 15 years, and to bar the DEA from collecting call records in bulk again.

April 9, 2015: DEA Global Surveillance Dragnet Exposed; Access to Data Likely Continues: The vast program reported on by USA Today shares some of the same hallmarks of Project Crisscross: it began in the early 1990s, was ostensibly aimed at gathering intelligence about drug trafficking, and targeted countries worldwide, with focus on Central and South America.

It is also reminiscent of the so-called Hemisphere Project, a DEA operation revealed in September 2013 by The New York Times, which dated as far back as 1987, and used subpoenas to collect vast amounts of international call records every day.

It's politics!

June 4, 2015: A bipartisan group of Washington lawmakers solicited details from Pentagon officials that they could use to "damage" former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's "credibility in the press and the court of public opinion."

That's according to declassified government documents obtained by VICE News in response to a long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The lawmakers' requests for information were made in December 2013 and again in February 2014, following classified briefings top officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) held for oversight committees in the House and Senate about a DIA assessment of the alleged damage to national security caused by Snowden's leak of top-secret documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras.

Documents reveal secret memos expanding spying

June 4, 2015: Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the NSA sought permission to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.

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