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(Updated: July 21, 2017) Since the Snowden revelations, we know that signals intelligence agencies are trying to acquire large sets of telephone metadata in order to analyse them in support of protecting their national security. Less known is that commercial companies also analyse similar big data sets, albeit for research purposes and with personal information being anonymized. Now, a research report from the Netherlands provides us with actual numbers of mobile telephone metadata, which can be used to compare with the numbers that NSA and GCHQ collected according to the Snowden documents. Tourist movements Recently published was a report about visitor movements in and around the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. It was prepared by the economic research company Decisio on behalf of the province of Noord-Holland and the municipalities of Amsterdam and Zandvoort. Since a few years, Amsterdam almost suffers from a huge increase of tourists, but it was difficult to get detailed insights in wh...

(Updated: July 20, 2017) In the previous posting we saw that the domestic telephone records, which NSA collected under authority of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (internally referred to as BR-FISA), were stored in the centralized contact chaining system MAINWAY, which also contains all kinds of metadata collected overseas. Here we will take a step-by-step look at what NSA analysts do with these data in order to find yet unknown conspirators of foreign terrorist organisations. It becomes clear that the initial contact chaining is followed by various analysis methods, and that the domestic metadata are largely integrated with the foreign ones, something NSA never talked about and which only very few observers noticed. What is described here is the situation until the end of 2015. The current practice under the USA FREEDOM Act differs in various ways. The information in this article is almost completely derived from documents declassified by the US government, but these have vari...

(Updated: November 23, 2016) One of the most controversial NSA programs was the bulk collection of domestic telepone records (metadata) under authority of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The Snowden revelations provided hardly any information about this program, but many details became available from documents that were declassified by the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Because in these declassified documents all codenames are redacted, it was largely a mystery which NSA systems were used to store and analyse these metadata. By combining many separate pieces from both the Snowden-documents, as well as those declassified by the government, it now has become clear that NSA put the domestic phone records in its central contact chaining system MAINWAY, which also contains all sorts of metadata collected overseas. Reconstruction of the MAINWAY dataflow (Click to enlarge) MAINWAY versus MARINA Initially it was thought that MAINWAY was a repository just for telephone metad...

(Updated: May 9, 2015) In a previous article we provided a very extensive description of a communications analysis tool used by the Canadian agency CSEC. Here we will show two video demonstrations of analysis tools which are used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies all over the world: Sentinel Visualizer and Analyst's Notebook. Sentinel Visualizer The first intelligence analysis program is Sentinel Visualizer , which was developed by FMS Advanced Systems Group. This is a 'minority-owned' small business founded in 1986 and based in Vienna, Virginia, which provides custom software solutions to customers in over 100 countries. This video shows a demonstration of how the Sentinel Visualizer software program can be used to analyse telephony metadata in order to discover new targets: FMS claims that In-Q-Tel , the CIA's venture capital arm is an investor in FMS, apparently in order to improve their products so they can fit the needs of the CIA. FMS also claims that...