Snowden Leaks Reveal Ghost In The Machine
Ryan Gallagher of The Intercept reports:
the top-secret memo notes that the NSA had separately agreed with GCHQ to share data on a broader “unsupervised” basis as part of a program called Olympic Option.
Olympic Option was a surveillance program operated during the London Olympics in 2012, under which at least 100 GCHQ operatives were given access to the PRISM system “throughout the Olympic timeframe,” ostensibly to identify potential terror threats. In a single six-day period in May 2012, according to a top-secret PowerPoint slide, GCHQ received 11,431 “cuts of traffic” from communications intercepted using PRISM. (“Cuts” is a term used by the NSA to describe extracts of conversations that it collects.) The memo prepared for Alexander describes the British request for unsupervised access to FISA 702 data as “in a manner similar to Olympics Option [sic].”
The data sharing between the agencies during the Olympics, though, was not isolated to PRISM. It also encompassed large volumes of metadata – such as the “to” and “from” details from an email but not the content of the message itself – as part of a more expansive Olympics surveillance effort. The NSA was funneling troves of intercepted data to GCHQ from a system called GHOSTMACHINE, a massive cloud database used by the NSA to analyze metadata and store, according to one document in the Snowden archive, “100s of billions of entries.”Read the full story here.
via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1iKfoeo
No comments:
Post a Comment