New details from the Snowden files found by the Libroot collective

(Updated: August 6, 2026)

More than 12 years after the start of the Snowden revelations in June 2013, there are still new details to be found in the ca. 1200 highly classified documents that have been released to the public.

The latest finds are the result of mostly technical analysis conducted by a collective called Libroot. Since December last year, they are publishing the results in a series of postings on their website.

The Libroot collective

The new results from analyzing the Snowden documents are published on the website Libroot.org, which is aimed at "spying back" at the NSA under the motto "surveillance in the crosshairs".

It's not known who are behind the Libroot website but they describe themselves as "a collective focused on exposing and resisting surveillance and oppressive digital infrastructures. We create tools, research, and archives that defend digital autonomy." Libroot works on various projects, some of which are published on their website.

One of their projects is called "Going Through Snowden Documents", for which the Libroot collective "systematically reviews each available document with particular attention to small details and information that has received little or no public attention since the initial 2013 disclosures."



Going Through Snowden Documents

So far, "Going Through Snowden Documents" resulted in seven postings, which are summarized below (when new postings appear, they will be added). The titles of these summaries link to the original postings on the Libroot website. Each of these postings is very detailed and interesting, so I highly recommend reading them in full.

Part 1: CNE analysis in XKEYSCORE (December 9, 2025)

In their first posting, the Libroot collective analyzed an NSA presentation titled CNE Analysis in XKEYSCORE from 2009. This presentation was part of a large set of slide decks about the XKEYSCORE system which were published by The Intercept in July 2015 but were never analyzed individually.

Libroot looked specifically at the screenshots shown in this presentation. This revealed evidence that the NSA hacked the computer network of the Chinese company Norinco or North Industries Corporation, which is one of the world's largest state-owned defense contractors.

Other targets of NSA hacking operations were the mail servers of the Mexican federal law enforcement agencies Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP) and Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP).

Yet another screenshot included in the XKS presentation shows that NSA compromised a laptop that likely belonged to someone working in Iranian transportation or customs infrastructure.

Finally, the presentation includes some codewords which were not yet included in my extensive listing of NSA Nicknames and Codewords (but have been added now):

- GREENCHAOS: A collection source feeding CNE data into XKEYSCORE?
- SHADOWQUEST: A collection source feeding CNE data into XKEYSCORE?
- TUCKER: An exploitation framework comparable to UNITEDRAKE, with sub-projects including OLYMPUS, EXPANDINGPULLY and UNIX.
- TURBOCHASER: An NSA database for profiles and future tasking, appearing alongside MARINA.
- WAYTIDE: A collection source feeding CNE data into XKEYSCORE?

Part 2: Central and South American politics (December 11, 2025)

This analysis by the Libroot collective is about two NSA presentations about operations to intercept the communications of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and the Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto.

> See also on this weblog: An NSA eavesdropping case study

One of the slides from those presentations listed "Geopolitical Trends: Key Challenges" but was almost fully redacted when it was published. Libroot, however, was able to reconstruct the full content of that slide based upon screenshots from Brazilian television.

In this posting, Libroot also provides a full transcription of a letter from the US State Department to NSA director Keith Alexander. This letter was shown shortly on Brazilian television and only a small section had been published in Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide from 2014.

Part 3: Compromised telecommunications providers (December 25, 2025)

The third analysis by Libroot is about the NSA's TREASURE MAP presentation, which was published by Der Spiegel in September 2014. The TREASURE MAP tool provides "a near real-time, interactive map of the global Internet".

Besides the networks that make up the internet, TREASURE MAP also shows in which networks NSA and GCHQ have access points. Der Spiegel had already identified some satellite and internet providers that had been compromised.

By close examination, Libroot found another 20 major telecommunications providers across three continents which appeared to have been compromised. A list of those providers is in the posting on the Libroot website.

Part 4: Intelligence facilities inside the US (January 10, 2026)

Libroot also found out that in two documents from the Snowden trove some entire sections had been deleted, presumably by people from Greenwald's media outlet The Intercept. In both cases, the deleted sections were about intelligence facilities inside the US, while information about similar facilities abroad was not redacted.

The first document is apparently from the Menwith Hill Satellite Classification Guide and was published by The Intercept in September 2016. Deleted from this document was text saying that "Classic Wizard Reporting and Testing Center" is an unclassified cover name for the Potomac Mission Ground Station (PMGS). This facility is located at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington DC and functions as a Mission Ground Station (MGS) for NRO surveillance satellites.

The second document is titled NRO SIGINT Guide Pine Gap and was published by The Intercept in collaboration with the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) in August 2017. Deleted from this document was text saying that "Aerospace Data Facility" (ADF) is the unclassified cover name of the Consolidated Denver Mission Ground Station (CDMGS). This facility is located at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, which is also home to one of the NSA's regional Cryptologic Centers.

> See also on this weblog: The NSA's regional Cryptologic Centers

Part 5: Various redaction failures (January 17, 2026)

In their fifth posting, Libroot presents some additional redaction failures which they stumbled upon by conducting forensic analysis on PDF files from the Snowden trove. These failures are not very significant or spectacular, as in general the journalists redacted the files they published quite professionally.

The redaction failures include a total of some 20 usernames of NSA employees, as well as IP and email addresses of foreign targets. The NSA usernames, or Security Identifiers (SIDs), all consist of two initials followed by the first four or five letters of someone's surname. For example, Snowden's username at the NSA was "ejsnowd".

> See also on this weblog: E-mails from inside the NSA bureaucracy

Part 6: UNAMI router configurations (April 17, 2026)

This posting is about some screenshots included in an NSA presentation titled VPN SigDev Basics, which was published by Der Spiegel in December 2014. These screenshots show the interface of the NSA's DISCOROUTE program, which is a "project to acquire, parse, database and display configuration files from network devices."

In these screenshots, Libroot noticed a search for crypto keys from routers used by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI). According to Libroot, this strongly indicates that the NSA had collected the full configuration data of at least eleven network routers used by UNAMI.

Part 7: NSA presentation containing sensitive data (May 5, 2026)

The seventh posting by Libroot is about an NSA presentation from early or mid-2012 titled What Your Mother Never Told You About SIGDEV Analysis, which was published by Der Spiegel in December 2014 as part of a long story about internet encryption.

Libroot was able to undo almost every redaction in that presentation, which revealed the full names of at least 14 NSA employees, as well as IP addresses and names of companies and organizations that had been targeted by the agency (which Libroot didn't publish).

In the same NSA presentation is a screenshot which contains another screenshot, but so tiny that it was almost invisible. When restored to its original size, it appeared to be the NSA's internal WikiInfo page about TNS (Target Network Service).

The screenshots also contain some new NSA codewords:

- BLACKBEACH: (related to BLACKPEARL?)
- BLACKSAND: (related to BLACKPEARL?)
- DARKSUNRISE: VPN exploitation tool released in Fall 2012.
- POTLUCK: (internal NSA or IC search engine?)
- SHADOWNET: Tool for exploitation of VPN communications.*
- TROPICNET: ?

Part 8: Some hitherto unseen snippets (July 1, 2026)

In their eighth posting, the Libroot collective presents three snippets which are probably all part of an SIDtoday newsletter written in March 2013 by an operator of SHENANIGANS, an airborne system that collected wireless data. These three snippets were uploaded to the webserver of The Intercept, but never linked to any story. One of the snippets mentions the Utah Regional Operations Center (UROC), which is very rare.

This Libroot posting includes another classified document, this time uploaded to the DocumentCloud account of The Intercept. It seems to be part of the large batch of files published with an article about XKEYSCORE from July 2015, but again, this document is not linked in the article itself. The document was ceated by Booz Allen Hamilton and titled Mail and Ports Cheat Sheet.

On their website, Libroot writes that their examination of all the published documents leaked by Edward Snowden "will hopefully be complete and made public in mid-to-late 2026."

On the 10th anniversary of the Snowden revelations

(Updated: April 7, 2025)

To mark the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden revelations I will look back at some of the most notable disclosures and how they developed, based upon the most recent books and the numerous blog posts I have written here. Still, it should be noted that this overview is not a complete coverage of this wide-ranging topic.

Books and archives       Incentives       The documents       Non-Snowden leaks

The Section 215 program       The PRISM program       Overcollection

The Mission List       Spying among friends       Backdoor tapping Google

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT       Truth       Conclusion

Books and archives     Incentives

The documents     Non-Snowden leaks

Section 215     PRISM

Overcollection     The Mission List

Spying among friends     Backdoor tapping

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT    Truth

Conclusion

Books and archives

Between June 2013 and May 2019, the Snowden revelations resulted in over 200 press reports and more than 1200 classified documents published in full or in part. Additionally, The Intercept published 2148 editions of the NSA's internal newsletter SIDtoday. In total, that may be well over 5000 pages.

A collection that allows a useful visual recognition of the documents was found on the private website IC Off the Record, while text searches are possible at the Snowden Archive which is a collaboration between Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) and the University of Toronto. A private collection of the documents is also available at GitHub.

Update: The Snowden documents are also available on the website of the Dutch transparancy organization Buro Jansen & Janssen: as a list of NSA files and with a search interface.

There are also at least 12 books about the Snowden revelations. Glenn Greenwald's No Place To Hide from 2014 reads like a pamphlet against perceived mass surveillance. A much more factual overview can be found in Der NSA Komplex, which is also published in 2014 and written by two journalists from Der Spiegel, but unfortunately only available in German.

Detailed insights into the political and legal background of the NSA's collection programs are provided in Timothy Edgar's Beyond Snowden from 2017, which is in contrast to Snowden's own memoir Permanent Record from 2019, which leaves more questions than answers.

Finally, there's also the long-awaited book Dark Mirror by Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman, which was published in 2020 and offers some important new angles to the initial stories told by Snowden and Greenwald.

> See also my review of Permanent Record: Part I: at the CIA - Part II: at the NSA

Incentives

Some people assume that Snowden is a spy who worked for Russian intelligence, but nowadays, requests for information come from transparency activists as well. Wikileaks' wiki-page titled The Most Wanted Leaks of 2009 may have inspired Manning to search for information on SIPRNet and to download hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic reports.

Likewise, the incentive for Snowden may have come from the news program Democracy Now!, in which on April 20, 2012, former NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and hacktivist Jacob Appelbaum were interviewed by Amy Goodman (a full transcript can be found here).

In the program, Binney claimed that after 9/11 "all the wraps came off for NSA, and they decided to eliminate the protections on U.S. citizens and collect on domestically".

Appelbaum repeated what he said at the HOPE conference in 2010: "I feel that people like Bill need to come forward to talk about what the U.S. government is doing, so that we can make informed choices as a democracy" - which is exactly what Snowden would do: leaking documents because "the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong."

Later that day, Binney and Appelbaum spoke at a "Surveillance Teach-In" in the Whitney Museum, where Appelbaum emphasized that disclosing secret information is also important for privacy and civil liberties organizations: because of a lack of hard evidence and concrete harm it was almost impossible for them to fight NSA surveillance in court.

Binney and Appelbaum at the Surveillance Teach-In on April 20, 2012

Whistleblowing?

Just a month earlier, Snowden had started a new job as a SharePoint systems administrator at the NSA's regional cryptologic center in the Kunia Tunnel complex in Hawaii. There, he began automating his tasks to free up time for something more interesting, which he describes in Permanent Record:

"I want to emphasize this: my active searching out of NSA abuses began not with the copying of documents, but with the reading of them. My initial intention was just to confirm the suspicions that I'd first had back in 2009 in Tokyo. Three years later I was determined to find out if an American system of mass surveillance existed and, if it did, how it functioned." *

With this, Snowden basically admits that he isn't a whistleblower: he wasn't confronted with illegal activities or significant abuses and subsequently secured evidence of that, but acted the other way around, by first gathering as much information he could get and then look whether there was something incriminating in it.

In his memoir, Snowden doesn't come up with concrete misconducts or other things that could have triggered his decision to hand the files over to journalists. He even omits almost all the disclosures made by the press, which makes that Permanent Record contains hardly anything that justifies his unprecedented data theft.

The tunnel entrance to the former Kunia Regional Security Operations Center
in Hawaii, where Snowden worked from March 2012 to March 2013
(photo: NSA - click to enlarge)

The documents

The actual number of documents which Snowden eventually exfiltrated from the NSA has never been clarified. According to the 2016 report from the US House Intelligence Committee, Snowden removed more than 1.5 million documents from NSANet and the JWICS intelligence network.

Glenn Greenwald repeatedly said that number was "pure fabrication" and he could probably agree with former NSA director Keith Alexander who in November 2013 estimated that Snowden had exposed only between 50,000 and 200,000 documents.*

According to Barton Gellman, Snowden provided him and Laura Poitras with an encrypted archive of documents called "Pandora" on May 21, 2013. This archive was 8 gigabytes and contained over 50,000 separate documents, all neatly organized in folders.*

Poitras gave Greenwald a copy of the Pandora archive just before they boarded their flight to Hong Kong on June 1. There, Snowden gave Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian some 50,000 documents about GCHQ and handed over all the remaining files to Greenwald and Poitras, who are the only ones with a complete set. Other media outlets only got partial sets of documents.

Greenwald's cache eventually ended up at The Intercept, the online news outlet he co-founded with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras in 2014 to report about the Snowden documents. In March 2019, however, The Intercept closed its Snowden archive and reportedly destroyed it.

> See also: The Snowden files: where are they and where should they end up?

Screenshot from a Brazilian television report, showing some of the Snowden files
opened in a TrueCrypt window on the laptop of Glenn Greenwald.
(screenshot by koenrh - click to enlarge)

Non-Snowden leaks

In a message to Gellman, Snowden said that "he was not resigned to life in prison or worse. He wanted to show other whistleblowers that there could be a happy ending".* Later, whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack hoped that "courage is contagious, and we see more and more people from the NSA coming through our door after Snowden made these revelations."

And indeed, other sources started to leak documents to the press. The first one was a so-called tasking record showing that the NSA had targeted the non-secure cell phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel. This was revealed by Der Spiegel on October 23, 2013, which is less than five months after the start of Snowden's revelations.

> See also: Update on tapping German chancellor Merkel's phone

The second leaked document that wasn't attributed to Snowden was just as spectacular: the ANT product catalog with a range of sophisticated spying gadgets from the NSA's hacking division TAO. This catalog was also published by Der Spiegel and discussed by Jacob Appelbaum during the CCC on December 30, 2013.

Initially, hardly anyone noticed that these documents didn't come from Snowden, and so a mysterious "second source" was able to publish files that were sometimes even more embarrassing and damaging than those from the Snowden trove, like intercepted conversations from foreign government leaders.

Later, other piggybackers who called themselves The Shadow Brokers leaked highly sensitive information about NSA hacking tools. The sources of these leaks have never been identified, although it's often assumed that Russian intelligence was behind it. Snowden never addressed these other leaks, nor distanced himself from them.

> See also: Leaked documents that were not attributed to Snowden

NSA report about an intercepted conversation of French president Hollande.
Leaked by an unknown source and published by Wikileaks in 2015
(click to enlarge)

The Section 215 program

The very first disclosure of a document that did come from Snowden was the Verizon order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). This court convenes behind closed doors and is often, but injustly referred to as a "rubber stamp". The order was published by The Guardian on June 6, 2013.

The Verizon order showed that the NSA was collecting domestic telephone metadata under the so-called Section 215 program. In the US, this became the most controversial issue and initially it seemed to confirm cryptic public warnings by US senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, as well as the aforementioned claims by Bill Binney about domestic mass surveillance.

In reaction, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper started an unprecedented declassification effort and released numerous FISC and NSA documents about the Section 215 program on a newly created Tumblr site called IC On the Record.


Misunderstanding

This was meant to clarify a central misunderstanding: the fact that the NSA collects data inside the US doesn't mean they are spying on Americans. The NSA is still focused on foreign targets, but because they are using American internet services, it proved to be fruitful to intercept their data not only abroad, but at telecoms and internet companies inside the US as well (the "home field advantage").

Accordingly, the purpose of the Section 215 program was to find out whether foreign terrorists were in contact with unknown conspirators inside the US, which was one of the failures that could have prevented the attacks of 9/11.

Therefore, the only thing the domestic telephone records were used for was simple contact chaining: NSA started with a phone number of a foreign terrorist and then the MAINWAY system presented the (foreign and domestic) phone numbers with which that initial number had been in contact with, as well as the numbers they, in their turn had been in contact with, the so-called "second hop":

Explanation: How NSA contact chaining combines domestic and foreign phone records

In 2012, the NSA used 288 phone numbers as a "seed" for such a contact chaining query, resulting in 6000 phone numbers that analysts actually looked at. When this led to a suspicious American phone number, the NSA passed it on to the FBI for further investigation.

This true purpose of the domestic metadata collection was clearly laid out in a public report which the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) published in January 2014. The PCLOB found "no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot", but Section 215 was of some value as it offered additional leads and could show that foreign terrorist plots had no US nexus.

Although these domestic telephone records were not used to spy on Americans, and the FISC limited their retention to 5 years and prohibited the collection of location data, many people would not like to have them in an NSA database because of what Binney and Snowden called the possibility of a "turnkey tyranny".*

The publication of the Verizon order did not only make the general public aware of the Section 215 program, but also gave civil liberty organizations standing in court, which fulfilled Jacob Appelbaum's wish from the 2012 Surveillance Teach-In.

Meanwhile there have been two cases in which a Circuit Court of Appeals ruled about the Section 215 program. They both found that the bulk collection of metadata exceeded the scope of Section 215 of the Patriot Act (because the actual practice hadn't been foreseen by lawmakers, although they had been briefed about it later). The courts didn't decide on whether the program was constitutional or not.

> See also: About the legality and constitutionality of the Section 215 metadata program

The first page of the Verizon order from April 25, 2013
(click for the full document)

The PRISM program

One day after the publication of the Verizon order, The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the PRISM program, which became synonymous for an all encompassing NSA spying system, just like ECHELON was before.

In his book Dark Mirror, Barton Gellman tells a different story than Greenwald did in No Place to Hide. Greenwald presented himself as the one who was chosen by Snowden to lead the revelations and claimed that he and Laura Poitras were working with Snowden since February 2013, while Gellman only got "some documents" and that Snowden was angry about the fear-driven approach of The Washington Post.*

According to Gellman, the opposite was the case: on January 31, 2013, Laura Poitras already asked him for advice and on May 7, they agreed to work together. She introduced Gellman to her source, who still called himself Verax, and they started encrypted chat conversations. On May 20, Snowden sent them the full PRISM presentation, after which they signed a contract with The Washington Post on May 24.*

But Snowden was under severe time pressure and urged Gellman to rapidly publish the full PRISM presentation, which he had signed with a digital signature associated with his Verax alter ego. Only gradually did Gellman realize the implications of this. Snowden's plan was to ask political asylum at a foreign diplomatic mission in Hong Kong, where he wanted to use the cryptographic signature to identify himself as the source of the PRISM document (and didn't rule out to "provide raw source material to a foreign government").*

As a journalist, Gellman protected the identity of his source, but publishing the digitally signed PRISM presentation would make him and The Washington Post complicit in Snowden's flight from American law. After consulting Poitras, Gellman decided not to do so. On May 27, Snowden withdrew the exclusive right for the Washington Post and turned to Greenwald, who until that moment didn't know who Snowden was, nor had seen any of the documents.*

When Greenwald finally managed to get PGP working, Snowden sent him a zip-file with some 25 documents, including the 41-slide PRISM presentation. Greenwald started writing his own story about PRISM, which was published by The Guardian on June 6, 2013.* Just one hour earlier, The Washington Post had released its own PRISM story.

The most controversial part of these stories was the claim that "the National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants", which those companies vigorously denied.

That "direct access" was taken from one of the slides, but it's unclear why both Gellman and Greenwald stuck to the most simple interpretation of it. Fact is that they had access to the extensive accompanying speaker's notes, which clearly said: "PRISM access is 100% dependent on ISP provisioning".*

They also had all the other PRISM slides, including two that were published later on, which also show that the FBI is in between the NSA and the internet companies:

PRISM-slide published by Le Monde on October 22, 2013

In July 2014, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) published an extensive public report about PRISM as well, which confirms that individual selectors (like a target's e-mail address) are sent to internet companies, which are "compelled to give the communications sent to or from that selector to the government." According to the report, PRISM "has proven valuable in the government’s efforts to combat terrorism as well as in other areas of foreign intelligence."

> See also: What is known about NSA's PRISM program

In Dark Mirror, Gellman admits: "In retrospect, I do not love the way I wrote the [PRISM] story. I knew a lot less then than I learned later, with more time in the documents and many more interviews". A well-informed source told him that the systems of a company like Facebook are too complex to let the NSA plug in a cable. Only Facebook knows how to pull things out, which they can then hand over upon a valid request.* Google did that through secure FTP transfers and in person.

Another interesting addition provided by Gellman is about the date of the PRISM presentation, April 2013, which is less than one and a half months before Snowden left the NSA:

"Nothing Snowden had seen until now better suited his plan. He had been talking to Poitras for three months, but he still did not feel confident that his disclosures would seize attention from a public that had seldom responded strongly to privacy warnings. Most of the NSA programs that worried him were legally and technically intricate, not easy to explain. He needed examples that ordinary people would recognize. Along came [the PRISM] presentation, festooned at the top of every slide with iconic logos from the best-known Internet companies in the world. "PRISM hits close to people's hearts", he told me."*

Overcollection

While PRISM is no mass surveillance, but targeted collection against individual foreign targets, it still has a problematic aspect: overcollection. Snowden was eager to draw public attention to this issue and, according to Greenwald, took his last job at NSA Hawaii only in order to get access to the NSA's raw data repositories.* Snowden declined to repeat or explain that to Gellman though.*

He succeeded and was able to exfiltrate a cache of ca. 22,000 collection reports, containing 160,000 individual conversations (75% of which instant messages), which the NSA collected via the PRISM program between 2009 and 2012.*

Snowden handed them over to Barton Gellman who reported about these files in July 2014. Researchers at The Washington Post found that the intercepted communications contained valuable foreign intelligence information, but also that over 9 out of 10 accountholders were not the intended surveillance targets and that nearly half of the files contained US person identifiers.

It's probably technically impossible to prevent such overcollection, but instead of deleting irrelevant personal content, the NSA only "minimizes" it, which means that names of Americans are redacted before they are distributed. Gellman saw that NSA personnel takes these procedures seriously, but when he confronted former NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett with his unease, Ledgett's only reply was that the NSA really doesn't care about ordinary people.*

> See also: Section 702 FAA expires: what are the problems with PRISM and Upstream?

The Mission List

Ledgett's answer is confirmed by a comprehensive listing of the tasks of the NSA in the Strategic Mission List from January 2007. It was published by The New York Times in November 2013, but got hardly any attention, despite the fact that it clearly contradicts the claims by Snowden and Greenwald that the NSA has just one single goal: collect all digital communications from all over the world.

Equally less traction gained reports by Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian and Scott Shane from The New York Times, who tried to provide balance and nuance by showing that NSA and GCHQ also did many good things, like monitoring terrorists, the Taliban, hostage takers, human traffickers, and drug cartels.

The Mission List says that China, North-Korea, Iraq, Iran, Russia and Venezuela were "Enduring Targets", which means they are of long-term strategic importance and therefore require a holistic approach. Next there were 16 "Topical Missions", which are subject to some change, but can be considered legitimate targets for any large intelligence agency:

- Winning the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)
- Protecting the US homeland
- Combating proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
- Protecting US military forces deployed overseas
- Providing warning of impending state instability
- Providing warning of a strategic nuclear missile attack
- Monitoring regional tensions that could escalate
- Preventing an attack on US critical information systems
- Early detection of critical foreign military developments
- Preventing technological surprise
- Ensuring diplomatic advantage for the US
- Ensuring a steady and reliable energy supply for the US
- Countering foreign intelligence threats
- Countering narcotics and transnational criminal networks
- Mapping foreign military and civil communications infrastructure

In 2013, terrorism was replaced by cyber attacks as top threat to American national security. Since then, cyber threats are increasing in frequency, scale, sophistication and severity of impact.

> See also: NSA's Strategic Mission List

Screenshot of the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool showing where the NSA collected most data

Spying among friends

For its mission of "Ensuring Diplomatic Advantage for the U.S.", the NSA intercepts the communications of numerous foreign governments and government leaders. Based upon documents from the Snowden trove, media reported about eavesdropping operations against the Mexican candidate for the presidency, Enrique Peña Nieto, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, the Venezuelan oil company PdVSA and many others.

> See also: An NSA eavesdropping case study

The NSA's interest in Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel had the most far-reaching consequences. Merkel herself made clear to president Obama that "spying on friends is not acceptable" (Ausspähen unter Freunden, das geht gar nicht) and the German parliament started an official investigation into the spying activities of the NSA (NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss or #NSAUA). This inquiry lasted from March 2014 to June 2017, but soon shifted its focus to Germany's own foreign intelligence agency BND.

Extensive hearings of BND employees resulted in unprecedented insights into the details of the cable tapping and satellite interception operations which the BND conducted in cooperation with the NSA. Eventually it became clear that the NSA wasn't spying on German citizens, but did try to collect communications from European governments and companies of interest - just like the BND itself, which was also targeting American and French foreign ministers, the interior departments of EU member states, and many others.

> See also: New details about the selectors NSA provided to BND

German chancellor Angela Merkel holding a secure BlackBerry Z10 in 2013
(photo: Nicki Demarco/The Fold/The Washington Post)

Backdoor tapping Google

A disclosure that caused outrage in Silicon Valley was about MUSCULAR, a collection program in which the NSA cooperates with its British counterpart GCHQ. In October 2013, The Washington Post reported that under this program, the NSA had secretly broken into the main communications links between Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.

A big question was: why would the NSA do that, given that they already had "front door" access to Google and Yahoo via the PRISM program? Gellman asked Snowden, who didn't come much further than "Because it could" and: "I'm speculating, but NSA doesn't ignore low-hanging fruit". Eventually Gellman realized that inside the US, the NSA had to specify individual targets, but abroad it was possible to acquire such data in bulk and to search and analyse it with XKEYSCORE.*

The Post didn't mention the XKEYSCORE system by name and it's also not explained in Gellman's book Dark Mirror. That's unfortunate, because while Greenwald and Snowden presented XKEYSCORE as a global mass surveillance tool, it's actually a smart system to find targets who are communicating anonymously and therefore cannot be traced in the traditional way, via identifiers like phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

It seems that hardly anyone realized that the disclosure of XKEYSCORE must have been really damaging for the NSA. In the 1990s, ECHELON made clear that the agency targeted phone numbers, so terrorists and other adversaries began avoiding individual identifiers and switched to anonymous ways to communicate. It must have been an eye-opener that with XKEYSCORE, the NSA found a way to trace those as well.

> More about XKEYSCORE

NSA slide showing where to intercept data from the Google cloud

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT

Where Section 215 was most controversial in the United States, but lesser-known in Europe, the opposite was the case with BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which caused fury in Europe, but is hardly known across the ocean. BOUNDLESSINFORMANT isn't a system to collect data, but an internal visualization tool that counts metadata records to provide insights into the NSA's worldwide data collection.

The results are shown in heat maps and charts, like for individual countries and collection programs. Such charts for Germany and a few other countries were published on July 29, 2013 by Der Spiegel, but on August 5, the German foreign intelligence agency BND said that they collected these data during military operations abroad and subsequently shared them with the NSA.

Despite this statement, Glenn Greenwald interpreted these charts as evidence of American mass surveillance on European citizens and started publishing them in major European newspapers.

> See also: BOUNDLESSINFORMANT only shows metadata

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT chart showing the numbers of
metadata which German BND shared with the NSA

On October 21, for example, the French paper Le Monde published a story saying that "telephone communications of French citizens are intercepted on a massive scale." After a similar story appeared in Spain, NSA director Keith Alexander came with a remarkable clarification, saying: "This is not information that we collected on European citizens. It represents information that we and our NATO allies have collected in defense of our countries and in support of military operations."

Greenwald continued his framing in Norwegian and Italian papers. Only in The Netherlands it was found out that the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT charts were not about content, but about metadata. Dutch interior minister Ronald Plasterk, however, still followed Greenwald's interpretation and assumed the Americans were spying on Dutch citizens. A court case forced the government to admit that Dutch military intelligence had collected the data during operations abroad.

> See also: Dutch government tried to hide the truth about metadata collection

Correction

It was only in May 2019 that The Intercept put the pieces together and set the record straight: the various BOUNDLESSINFORMANT charts showed cellphone metadata that had been collected by members of the Afghanistan SIGINT Coalition (AFSC, also known as the 9 Eyes) and fed them into the NSA's Real-Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG) big data analysis platform.

When The Intercept confronted Greenwald with this new research, he still tried to blame the NSA: "At the time, Der Spiegel had already reported this interpretation, the NSA wouldn’t answer our questions, and they wouldn’t give us any additional information. I am totally in favor of correcting the record if the reporting was inaccurate."

While Greenwald ignored the declaration by general Alexander, he was right when he said that the NSA's internal documentation about BOUNDLESSINFORMANT was somewhat confusing. Apparently, Greenwald had to rely on that documentation because Snowden was of little help, just like he was for various other programs that journalists did not fully understand.

> See also: From 9-Eyes to 14-Eyes: the Afghanistan SIGINT Coalition (AFSC)

Slide showing all the collection systems that fed the RT-RG platform
(click to enlarge)

Truth

Many of the documents that Snowden provided to the press have been misinterpreted or exaggerated, sometimes unintentional, but in other cases maybe deliberately. In Dark Mirror, Barton Gellman writes:

"There were signs that Snowden was capable of an instrumental approach to truth. In conversations about my work, when I got stuck on a hard reporting problem, he sometimes suggested that I provoke fresh disclosures from government officials by pretending to know more than I did."

"Another time he went further, proposing that I actually publish informed speculation as fact. If my story outran the evidence, he said, the government would be forced to respond and thereby reveal more. There would be a net gain for public information either way."

"He said misinformation from people like Mike Hayden, supporters of the intelligence establishment, pushed the terms of debate so far off center that only rhetorical counterforce could set the record straight."*

Gellman declined this approach because it would make his reporting unreliable and it undermines confidence in the press if it would turn out that certain things weren't true. However, claims made by Greenwald and Snowden himself showed that his "counterforce" method sometimes did work: the government came up with new facts - but those never got the same attention as the original story, which was already stuck in people's minds.



Conclusion

There's no doubt that the Snowden revelations provided unprecedented insight into modern-day signals intelligence as conducted by the NSA and its Five Eyes partners.

In part this was much needed to understand how the legal framework is implemented and where safeguards need improvement. That, however, requires a close examination of the documents, which shows the problems are smaller and more complex than the mythical "global mass surveillance" which Snowden and Greenwald tried to proof.

On the other hand, many things have been published that were merely sensational and weakened the US and its signals intelligence system. By revealing its workings and capacity, the Snowden revelations unintentionally set a new standard which other countries hurried to catch up with.



Links

- Der Spiegel: Das Internet ist heute anders unsicher (June 9, 2023)
- The Atlantic: Did the Snowden Revelations Change Anything? (June 7, 2023)
- The Guardian: Snowden, MI5 and me: how the leak of the century came to be published (June 7, 2023)
- The Guardian: What’s really changed 10 years after the Snowden revelations? (June 7, 2023)
- Schneier on Security: Snowden Ten Years Later (June 6, 2023)
- System Update: SNOWDEN REVELATIONS 10-Year Anniversary: Glenn Greenwald Speaks with Snowden & Laura Poitras on the Past, Present, & Future of Their Historic Reporting (June 6, 2023)
- neues deutschland: 10 Jahre Snowden-Leaks: Enthüllungen nicht mehr erwünscht (June 6, 2023)
- neues deutschland: Snowden-Leaks: Geheimdokumente belegen globale Massenüberwachung (June 6, 2023)
- Heise: Edward Snowden: Die Enthüllungen des NSA-Whistleblowers 10 Jahre später (June 5, 2023)
- Der Tagesspiegel: Edward Snowden und die Whistleblower-Frage Feiert die Verräter! (June 2023)
- Netkwesties: Barton Gellman herziet NSA-onthullingen (Dec. 7, 2020)
- See also: Timeline of Edward Snowden

- Documentary: Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or Spy?


Comments at Hacker News

Edward Snowden and the targeted drone killing campaign

Two weeks ago, on October 22, a new document from the Snowden files was published for the first time in over two years. It's an entry from Intellipedia about the American drone killing campaign that was released by journalist and writer Spencer Ackerman.

While the content of the document is hardly significant, it's form is remarkably similar to an Intellipedia entry that was published in 2015, which leads us to Snowden's interest in the drone killings and The Drone Papers that Daniel Hale leaked to The Intercept.

Ackerman's publication

Except for five new partial documents published in Barton Gellman's book Dark Mirror in May 2020, the last release of files from the Snowden trove was in May 2019, when The Intercept and the Norwegian broadcaster NRK published a range of documents about NSA's Real Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG) collection system. Two months earlier, the publisher of The Intercept had already decided to shut down the Snowden archive.

> See also: The Snowden files: where are they and where should they end up?

The new document comes from the cache of Snowden documents that is kept by the American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who now lives in Berlin. According to Ackerman, Poitras was preparing for her exhibition Parallel Construction that marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, when she "came across the Intellipedia entry and realized no one had ever published it" and then gave him a copy of it.

Ackerman published the document on Substack, an online platform for journalistic articles and newsletters, where he has an account called Forever Wars to "chronicle, investigate and interrogate the continuities, departures and permutations of the War on Terror". There he discusses the Intellipedia entry in an article titled "On U.S. Intelligence’s Wiki, Anxiety About Legal Challenges To Drone Strikes".

The Intellipedia entry (full document) published by Spencer Ackerman

The Intellipedia entry provides a summary of policies and opinions about the issue of targeted (drone) killings, mostly based upon public news reports and therefore almost all the content is unclassified. What Ackerman thinks is newsworthy is "the document's occasionally alarmist depiction of legal and political challenges to the strikes" and that it shows a "paranoid" feeling among US intelligence analysts.

Apparently this is only based on the following sections in the Intellipedia entry, which actually hardly support Ackerman's interpretation:

- "Those opposing targeted killing are increasing their organization and activities. If timing is more than coincidental, activists may coordinate their opposition efforts."

- "The effort may indicate a concerted effort by human rights organizations, activist international lawyers and opposition forces to undermine the use of remotely piloted vehicles, targeted killing, preemption and other direct action as elements of Uniited States policy."

Ackerman also argues that the way the Intellipedia entry places "legal and political challenges to drone strikes on a continuum with warfare is of a piece with how U.S. intelligence can also view journalism on a continuum with espionage" - which refers to the prosecution of Julian Assange, who by his supporters is seen as an innocent journalist, while he actually engaged in acts of espionage and conspiracy against the United States.



A similar Intellipedia entry

More interesting than the content, is the form of the newly disclosed document, because it turns out that it's very similar to another Intellipedia entry which is titled "Manhunting Timeline 2008" and was published by The Intercept in July 2015, along with a report about Israeli assassination operations:

Intellipedia entry (full document) published by The Intercept in 2015

This earlier Intellipedia entry is less blurry and has some additional details compared to the one published by Ackerman. First, it has all the navigation menus, including the one that's usually in the upper right corner of the browser window and includes the user name, something The Intercept forgot to redact in this case:

Another interesting detail is a message that appeared on top of the article to announce Intellipedia users that they should expect maintenance of the Intelink Instant Messenger (IIM) service on January 3, 2013.

This indicates that this document was viewed, stored and/or downloaded shortly before that date - a period when Snowden was a SharePoint systems administrator in the Office of Information Sharing at the NSA's regional Cryptologic Center in Hawaii.

> See also: About Intellipedia and other intelligence wikis from the Snowden trove

Some details of the Intellipedia entry titled Manhunting Timeline 2008
(click to enlarge)

Even more interesting are the markings at the very top and bottom of each page, which appear when an article is printed or saved through the "Printable version" option in the wiki interface: at the bottom of each page there's the URL (redacted, but remarkably long) and the page number, while at the top of the page there's the date and the title of the article, in this case "Manhunting Timeline 2008 - Intellipedia".

The date on this document is "6/2/2015" or June 2, 2015, which is more than two years after Snowden left the NSA, but just a month before The Intercept published it. Because one of the URLs has not been completely redacted, we see that when the file was printed, it was not on an internal US government network, but on a local computer drive:

This indicates that Snowden provided the entry in a digital form and that The Intercept read and printed it using a locally installed Wiki engine. For publication the print was scanned to turn it into a digital file again, which now included the printing marks. Was this to make the Intellipedia entry look like other drone documents provided by Daniel Hale?


On the Intellipedia entry published by Ackerman we see a similar page title ("Targeted Killing: Policy, Legal and Ethical Controversy - Intellipedia") but no date and also no URL and page number, but maybe that's because the bottom parts of the pages have been cut off ("some excisions for caution that do not affect the document’s narrative" according to Ackerman):

Therefore, it's not clear when this document was printed, but given the fact that it's also a sub-topic of Intellipedia's main article about Manhunting, we can assume that Snowden provided it in digital form, just like the Manhunting Timeline 2008. So was the new document also printed to look like the earlier ones, or was it just a safer way to hand it over to Ackerman?

Documents in a printed form immediately remind of the series of classified documents that were leaked by other sources than Edward Snowden. Most, but not all of them were eventually traced back to former NSA and NGA contractor Daniel Hale, who was arrested in May 2019. It turned out that in 2014 he printed a range of classified documents which were subsequently published by The Intercept.

> See also: Daniel Hale arrested for being the source of The Drone Papers

Snowden and the drone killings

Daniel Hale's aim was to provide information about the drone strikes in order to end these lethal operations and it seems that Snowden was interested in this issue too, besides his main goal of fighting mass surveillance by the US government.

Already in October 2013, The Washington Post reported about a file which was "part of a collection of records in the Snowden trove that make clear that the drone campaign — often depicted as the CIA's exclusive domain — relies heavily on the NSA's ability to vacuum up enormous quantities of e-mail, phone calls and other fragments of signals intelligence, or SIGINT."

This sounds like Snowden had made a folder with various documents about drone killings, similar to the folders he had created about other topics that had his special interest, like operations of the NSA divisions TAO (hacking) and SSO (cable tapping). Journalist Barton Gellman confirms that the encrypted archive with some 50.000 documents he and Laura Poitras received in May 2013 was "neatly organized in folders".*


Revelations about targeted drone killings

Despite this apparently special collection of records, there have been only very few revelations about the NSA's involvement in targeted drone killings:

- The first one was on October 16, 2013, by The Washington Post, titled Documents reveal NSA’s extensive involvement in targeted killing program, but this piece only refers to documents instead of publishing them.

- On February 10, 2014, The Intercept came with an article called The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program, which is based on accounts by "a former drone operator for the military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA" (Daniel Hale?) with some additional snippets from the Snowden trove.

- On July 15, 2015, The Intercept published the Intellipedia entry with the Manhunt Timeline 2008 as part of a report titled Israeli Special Forces Assassinated Senior Syrian Official.

That's not much, although Snowden's selection of drone-related documents may also have included files about NSA programs in support of the drone killings, like systems for tracing potential targets by geolocating their mobile phones, or the role of Menwith Hill Station in the United Kingdom, for example.


The drone killings as a trigger for Snowden?

According to Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide from May 2014, Snowden was already confronted with drone operations during his job at the NSA's Pacific Technical Center (PTC) at Yokota Air Base, near Tokyo in Japan, where he worked as a systems administrator from August 2009 to September 2010:

"The stuff I saw really began to disturb me", Snowden said, and: "I could watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill. You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people's Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive US surveillance capabilities had become" (p. 43).

According to Greenwald, Snowden then began to feel an increasingly urgent obligation to leak what he was seeing, which makes it remarkable that this experience isn't mentioned in his own book, Permanent Record, which was published in September 2019.

In this book, Snowden only presents the press reports about the drone killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi as an example of how the US government itself is also leaking classified information when it serves its own interest (p. 237-238).

And instead of the drone campaign, Permanent Record comes up with two other "atomic moments" which Snowden experienced while he was in Japan: learning about the domestic mass surveillance of the Chinese government and the STELLARWIND report about president Bush' warrantless wiretapping program.

> See also: Edward Snowden and the STELLARWIND report

Later, however, Snowden said that he discovered the STELLARWIND report only much later, somewhere in 2012, when he was working at the NSA in Hawaii. It was actually several times that Snowden changed the narrative about what the decisive moment for his actions was (another one was the Clapper testimony), but when there's indeed a separate folder with drone killing documents that would confirm a special interest in this topic.



Daniel Hale's leaks

Daniel Hale had a similar experience as Snowden in Japan, but only in March 2012, a few days after he arrived in Afghanistan to work as a intelligence analyst at Bagram Airfield. There he witnessed how a group of men were killed by a drone strike, just because one of them carried a targeted cell phone. Since then he had increasing moral objections against these operations.

In April 2013, Hale attended a presentation of Jeremy Scahill's book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield about the drone killings program under president Obama. As of June they contacted eachother by phone and by e-mail and in September Scahill asked Hale to set up a Jabber account for encrypted chat conversations.

On October 16, 2013, The Washington Post published its piece about how documents provided by Snowden revealed the NSA's involvement in the targeted killing program. This article may have provided additional inspiration to Hale, because in December 2013 he accepted a new job at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

Although he felt uneasy, Hale said he took the job because "the money I could make was by far more than I had ever made before" - but maybe it was also an opportunity to get access to classified military information again, similar to Snowden who took his job at Booz Allen to get access to additional documents.

Between February and August 2014, Hale printed 23 mostly classified documents, 17 of which he provided to Jeremy Scahill, who then worked for Greenwald's new online news outlet The Intercept. Somewhere in the same period Greenwald traveled to Moscow and informed Snowden about a new source with important information about the drone program, which was shown in Laura Poitras' film Citizenfour from October 2014:

Glenn Greenwald informing Edward Snowden about The Intercept's new source
(still from the documentary film Citizenfour)

In the Summer of 2014, The Intercept had already published two of Hale's documents about NCTC watchlisting, but it took until April 17, 2015 for The Intercept and Der Spiegel to publish a Top Secret diagram about the drone operations and on October 15, 2015, The Intercept finally released four classified documents along with eight articles as "The Drone Papers".



Conclusion

For Snowden, who called it "the most important national security story of the year", The Drone Papers must have been a triumph because finally someone had followed in his footsteps and leaked details about the drone program which he was apparently also concerned about for years.

However, it was also a bitter defeat, because just three days after Daniel Hale had printed out his last document, the FBI had already tracked him down and raided his home (he was arrested in May 2019 and eventually sentenced to 45 months in prison). Is this why there's nothing about Hale, nor about the NSA's involvement in drone killing operations in Snowden's book Permanent Record?

Another question is why Laura Poitras thought Spencer Ackerman should publish a rather uninteresting Intellipedia entry. Was there really nothing more interesting about this topic among the Snowden files? Or was it a signal that, unlike The Intercept, she is still willing to publish things from the Snowden archive?



Links and sources
- Forever Wars: On U.S. Intelligence’s Wiki, Anxiety About Legal Challenges To Drone Strikes (2021)
- CNN: A 'second Snowden' leaks to the Intercept about 'drone wars' (2015)
- Zone d'Intérêt: U.S. Intelligence Support to Find, Fix, Finish Operations (2015)
- The Washington Post: Documents reveal NSA’s extensive involvement in targeted killing program (2013)