"Stellar Wind" was the code name of a warrantless surveillance program begun under the George W. Bush administration's President's Surveillance Program (PSP). The National Security Agency (NSA) program was approved by President Bush shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and was revealed by Thomas Tamm to The New York Times in 2004. Stellar Wind was a prelude to new legal structures that allowed President Bush and President Barack Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.
Marc Ambinder is an American journalist and producer. He is editor-at-large of The Week and a member of the USA Today national board of contributors. He is currently the journalist-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. His third book, The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983, is to be published by Simon & Schuster in July 2018. He is developing a college course on national security reporting for the University of Southern California.
Pinwale is the code name for a National Security Agency (NSA) collection and retrieval system for so-called "Digital Network Intelligence", including internet e-mail. It is searchable by monitored NSA analysts.
Tempora is the codeword for a formerly secret computer system that is used by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). This system is used to buffer most Internet communications that are extracted from fibre-optic cables, so these can be processed and searched at a later time. It was tested since 2008 and became operational in the autumn of 2011.
XKeyscore is a formerly secret computer system first used by the United States National Security Agency for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects on a daily basis. The program has been shared with other spy agencies including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters and the German Bundesnachrichtendienst.
The Unified Targeting Tool (UTT) is a software program used by NSA to select targets for surveillance. It has gained attention as one of the programs exposed by Edward Snowden. It is mentioned as part of the PRISM program, and in other documents.
Ragtime or RAGTIME is the code name of four secret surveillance programs conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. These programs date back to at least 2002 and were revealed in March 2013 in the book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady.
STORMBREW is a secret internet surveillance program of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. It was disclosed in the summer of 2013 as part of the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners' global surveillance of foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. The reports mostly emanate from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which he obtained whilst working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States. In addition to a trove of U.S. federal documents, Snowden's cache reportedly contains thousands of Australian, British and Canadian intelligence files that he had accessed via the exclusive "Five Eyes" network. 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 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad, Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).
This is a category of disclosures related to global surveillance.
Global surveillance refers to the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders. Its roots can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century when the UKUSA Agreement was jointly enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, which later expanded to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to create the present Five Eyes alliance. The alliance developed cooperation arrangements with several "third-party" nations. Eventually, this resulted in the establishment of a global surveillance network, code-named "ECHELON" (1971).
The Fourth Amendment Protection Acts, are a collection of state legislation aimed at withdrawing state support for bulk data (metadata) collection and ban the use of warrant-less data in state courts. They are proposed nullification laws that, if enacted as law, would prohibit the state governments from co-operating with the National Security Agency, whose mass surveillance efforts are seen as unconstitutional by the proposals' proponents. Specific examples include the Kansas Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act and the Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act. The original proposals were made in 2013 and 2014 by legislators in the American states of Utah, Washington, Arizona, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and California. Some of the bills would require a warrant before information could be released, whereas others would forbid state universities from doing NSA research or hosting NSA recruiters, or prevent the provision of services such as water to NSA facilities. The bills are based on a model act provided by the Tenth Amendment Center and Offnow.
Upstream collection is a term used by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States for intercepting telephone and Internet traffic from the Internet backbone, i.e. major Internet cables and switches, both domestic and foreign. Besides the Upstream collection, NSA also gathers information from Internet communications through arrangements with Internet companies under the program codenamed PRISM. Both the Upstream programs and PRISM are part of the Special Source Operations (SSO) division, which is responsible for collection in cooperation with corporate partners.
TURBINE is the codename of an automated system which in essence enables the automated management and control of a large network of implants.
Operation Eikonal is a collaboration between the National Security Agency (NSA) and Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) for the sharing of telephony and internet data captured in Germany. It is based on an agreement that dates to 2002, and is part of the NSA operation "RAMPART-A". Surveillance started in 2003, telephony data was collected from 2004 onwards, and all internet traffic from the Deutsche Telekom (DT) switching center in Frankfurt was captured starting in 2005.
Targeted surveillance is a form of surveillance that is targeted on specific persons of interest and distinguished from mass surveillance. Untargeted surveillance is routinely accused of treating innocent people as suspects in ways that are unfair, of violating human rights, international treaties and conventions as well as national laws and of failing to pursue security effectively.
ICWATCH is a public database of mainly LinkedIn profiles of people in the United States Intelligence Community. The database was created by Transparency Toolkit and is hosted by WikiLeaks.
RAMPART-A is the code name for global mass surveillance and world-wide signals intelligence partnership program led by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). Aim of the program is to "gain access to high-capacity international fiber-optic cables that transit at major congestion points around the world".
A reference to TRAFFICTHIEF in an XKeyscore slide
