This 21 May 2009 presentation from the NSA’s Center for Content Extraction includes a slide that shows that the communications of 122 heads of government were stored in the agency’s central “Target Knowledge Base”, 11 of whom are named. The collection for most of these targets was automated: see the Der Spiegel article ‘A’ for […]

This slide from an undated NSA presentation demonstrates how the agency uses email and phone data to analyse the social networks of targets (the “Agent” in the diagram): see the New York Times article N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens, 28 September 2013.

This page from the NSA intranet dated July 2011 supplies advice from the NSA Offices of General Counsel (OGC) and Oversight and Compliance (NOC) on the admissibility of targeting strategies against the users of popular websites (including WikLeaks and the Pirate Bay): see the Intercept article Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed […]