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(UPDATED August 14, 2017) On July 12, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published two Top Secret NSA compliance reports, which were obtained after declassification under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). Here we will take a look the classification marking of these reports, of which one part has been redacted: Both documents are quarterly reports from the NSA to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on compliance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which governs both the PRISM and the Upstream collection efforts. One of the reports is from March 2014 , the other one from March 2015 . More about the content of these two compliance reports can be found in this article by The Hill, as well as in this posting on the weblog EmptyWheel.net. Here we will take a look at the classification of these reports. Classification marking The classification line of both reports is: TOP SECRET//[...]/SI//ORCON/NOFORN , which stands for: - TOP SECRET: the highes...

On July 24, the US National Archives released a series of 356 never-before-seen photos, most of them taken on September 11, 2001 inside the emergency bunker under the White House. The bunker is officially called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), but White House officials also call it the shelter. It was constructed in 1942 underneath the East Wing of the White House, which was primarily built to cover the building of the bunker. It is said the PEOC can withstand the blast overpressure from a nuclear detonation. One of the very few photos from inside the PEOC available before the recent release (White House photo - Click to enlarge) The photos were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Colette Neirouz Hanna, coordinating producer for the FRONTLINE documentary film team. They focus on the reaction from then-vice president Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials during the terrorist attacks. How Cheney reached ...

(Updated: October 6, 2015) Last Tuesday, June 23, the website Wikileaks (in cooperation with Libération and Mediapart ) published a number of NSA-documents showing that between 2006 and 2012, NSA had been able to eavesdrop on the phone calls of three French presidents. This is the first time we see actual finished intelligence reports that prove such eavesdropping, and being classified as TOP SECRET//COMINT-GAMMA they are much more sensitive than most of the documents from the Snowden-archive. Also it seems that these new Wikileaks-documents are not from Snowden, but from another source, which could be the same as the one that leaked a database record about NSA's eavesdropping on German chancellor Merkel. Update: On Monday, June 29, Wikileaks published two Information Need (IN) requests and five additional intelligence reports , but the latter are not as highly classified as the ones revealed earlier. - Intelligence reports - Tasking database records - A second source - - S...

(Updated: January 6, 2017) Most of the Snowden-revelations are about spying on the internet, but NSA and GCHQ are also conducting the more traditional collection of telephone communications that go through satellite links. What needs to be done before phone calls can be collected, can be learned from two highly detailed technical reports from the GCHQ listening station near Bude in the UK. These reports were published on August 31 last year by the German magazine Der Spiegel and the website The Intercept as part of a story about how Turkey is both a partner and a target for US intelligence. Here we will analyse what's in these reports, which give an interesting impression of the techniques used to transmit telephone communications over satellite links. Satellite dishes at the GCHQ intercept station near Bude, Cornwall, UK Officially, such technical reports are called "informal reports", as opposed to the "serialized reports" that contain finished intelligence...

(Updated: May 16, 2015) Last week, on September 6, the US Justice Department released a declassified version of a 2004 memorandum about the STELLARWIND program. The memorandum (pdf) is about the legality of STELLARWIND, which was a program under which NSA was authorized to collect content and metadata without the warrants that were needed previously. Here we will not discuss the STELLARWIND program itself, but take a close look at the STELLARWIND classification marking, which causes some confusion. Also we learn about the existance of mysterious compartments that point to some highly sensitive but yet undisclosed interception programs. > See also: The US Classification System Classification marking of the 2004 DoJ memorandum about STELLARWIND The redacted markings The first thing we see is that two portions of the classification marking have been blacked out: 1. The redacted space beween two double slashes This is very strange, because according to the official classification ma...