Collecting the call records of millions of Americans is nothing compared to the latest revelation about the National Security Agency. According to documents published on Thursday, the NSA is working to exploit every cell phone network on Earth.
Classified documents provided to The Intercept by former United States
government contractor Edward Snowden now show that the NSA has
sought to sabotage the encryption standards adopted by mobile
devices and the networks they operate on as part of the agency’s
efforts to collect the world’s communications for supposed
national security purposes.
According to files supplied to the website by Snowden, since at
least 2010 the NSA has been engaged in an exorbitant operation
that’s involved the US agency routinely eavesdropping on
companies and organizations around the globe that are affiliated
with the mobile technology industry in an effort to stay on top
of the encryption methods being used so they could then be
undermined by American spies.
Hundreds of targets have fallen victim to this act of NSA-led
espionage, Ryan Gallagher wrote for the Intercept, “in an
effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that
it can exploit for surveillance.”
Through the covert operation, codenamed AURORAGOLD, the NSA “has
monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than
1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network
operators,” Gallagher wrote, “intercepting confidential
company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone
networks.” Among the targets, he reported, is a UK-based
trade group, the GSM Association, which works closely with huge
American-headquartered firms including Microsoft, Facebook,
AT&T, and Cisco.
In September, the US Department of Commerce's National Institute
of Standards and Technology, NIST, gave the trade group’s
American office $821,948 to be used on, among other projects,
privacy challenges currently facing the mobile industry.
Nevertheless, Gallagher wrote that the Snowden files specifically
show that the NSA has targeted the GSMA’s working groups for
surveillance.
Previously, documents supplied by the former contractor have
shown that the NSA has spied on Petrobras, the national oil
company of Brazil, along with other individuals and entities
around the globe. That revelation and others have led to the
formation of a task group by US President Barack Obama in charge
of suggesting ways to reform the NSA. Nearly one year after that
group first supplied its recommendations, however, little has
changed at the agency since the time before the media first
reported on the Snowden leaks in June 2013.
Last month, lawmakers in Congress shot down a measure that would
have curtailed the collection of telephony metadata — call data
about numbers dialed — by the NSA, nearly a year and a half after
the practice was disclosed through secret documents supplied by
Snowden.
According to the latest report to stem from those files, the NSA
has maintained a list of 1,201 email “selectors” that are used to
target internal company details as part of AURORAGOLD since May
2012. In the four months before then, though, Gallagher reported
that between 363 and 1,354 selectors were “tasked” monthly by the
NSA for surveillance.
In one of the Snowden documents, Gallagher added, a map reveals
that nearly every country in the world is currently part of the
NSA’s operation, with 100 percent of some nations’ telecoms
having already been compromised. According to the journalist, the
program “aimed at ensuring virtually every cellphone network
in the world is NSA accessible.”