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 page from GCHQ’s internal GCWiki, last updated on 6 February 2012, describes progress on LOVELY HORSE, a tool that automates the monitoring of open-source information related to information security: see the Intercept article Western Spy Agencies Secretly Rely on Hackers for Intel and Expertise, 4 February 2015.

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.