This 24 May 2010 NSA presentation describes the ways the agency uses botnets (“bot herding”): see the Der Spiegel article The Digital Arms Race: NSA Preps America for Future Battle, 17 January 2015.

This undated screenshot from GCHQ’s internal GCWiki provides details of INCENSER, “a GERONTIC delivery from the NIGELLA access” – in other words, a supply of data arranged by Cable & Wireless from a rival company’s infrastructure: see the Süddeutsche Zeitung article Snowden-Leaks: How Vodafone-Subsidiary Cable & Wireless Aided GCHQ’s Spying Efforts, 25 November 2014. Download […]

This presentation gives an overview of the NSA’s programmes targeting the fibre optic cables that carry much of the world’s internet traffic. One slide gives a breakdown of which data sources form the basis of Presidential daily briefings. Another shows that the access point used to collect Yahoo and Google cloud data (MUSCULAR) is operated […]

This NSA Special Source Operations slide from 25 April 2013 shows that GCHQ’s INCENSER access continued after Vodafone acquired corporate partner Cable & Wireless the previous year: see the Süddeutsche Zeitung article Snowden-Leaks: How Vodafone-Subsidiary Cable & Wireless Aided GCHQ’s Spying Efforts, 25 November 2014.

This Boundless Informant slide shows the number of WINDSTOP records collected day-by-day between 10 December 2012 and 8 January 2013. WINDSTOP covers at least four NSA collection systems that depend on Five Eyes partners; the MUSCULAR project to intercept traffic from Google and Yahoo data centres is representated by the code DS-200B. In the given […]