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(Latest UPDATE : January 9, 2017) Earlier this month we learned the name of a second person who stole top secret documents from the US National Security Agency (NSA). After Edward Snowden admitted doing so publicly in June 2013, the FBI has now arrested the 51-year old Harold T. Martin III at his home in Maryland. Martin hoarded lots of classified documents, not only from NSA but also from a number of other military and intelligence agencies. The FBI is still comparing them with those from the recent Shadow Brokers leak and a range of other NSA leaks from the past few years, but given what's known now, it seems likely that at least one other leaker is still at large. The house of Harold T. Martin III in Glen Burnie, Maryland (photo: Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press) The New York Times reported that when the FBI raided Martin's house on August 27, they found paper documents and many terabytes of highly classified information, even going back the 1990s. At least six d...

(Latest UPDATE : April 15, 2017) Earlier this week, a group or an individual called the Shadow Brokers published a large set of files containing the computer code for hacking tools. They were said to be from the Equation Group , which is considered part of the NSA's hacking division TAO . The leak got quite some media attention, but so far it was not related to some earlier leaks of highly sensitive NSA documents. These show interesting similarities with the Shadow Brokers files, which were also not attributed to Edward Snowden, but seem to come from an unknown second source. Screenshot of some computer code with instructions from the Shadow Brokers archive from August 2016 (click to enlarge) The Shadow Brokers files Since August 13, Shadow Brokers posted a manifesto and two large encrypted files on Pastebin , on GitHub , on Tumblr and on DropBox (all of them closed or deleted meanwhile). One of the encrypted files could be decrypted into a 301 MB archive containing a large nu...

(Updated: August 24, 2016) The Snowden revelations made people familiar with what NSA calls "selectors": phone numbers, e-mail addresses and a whole range of similar groups of characters that can be used to identify a particular target. However, very little was revealed about how exactly these selectors are used in order to pick out communications of interest. But meanwhile, declassified documents about NSA, German parliamentary commission hearings and an intelligence oversight report from The Netherlands give some details about that. It came out that the signals intelligence agencies of these three countries (and likely many other countries too) group all selectors that belong to a certain target into sets called correlations or equations. Wrapping individual selectors into equations makes sense, as one of the most important requirements for signals intelligence is of course knowing which phone numbers, e-mail addresses etc. a particular target uses, as often they will use m...

(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...