Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden
revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) spied on its
world's foes and allies, including Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Israel,
several Latin American countries and Europe: Germany, Italy, Spain and
others. Here is Part One of the timeline of the NSA's blatant spy
programs from June to September 2013. (INFOGRAPHIC MAP)
Continue
6 June – Media reveal that
the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on communications
of Verizon customers in the US as part of the Prism surveillance
program. The leak blows the lid off the NSA scooping up data directly
from the servers of major US Internet providers.
7 June – The Guardian newspaper publishes a memo that lists potential targets for US surveillance and outlines its methods.
It is further
revealed that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the
UK helped itself to the data from NSA’s communications tapping program.
9 June – Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA under George W. Bush, says Obama’s presidency saw a hike in US surveillance.
11 June
– The Guardian discloses NSA's tool for cataloguing global data that
shows the agency has received a total of 30 billion data reports on web
traffic over thirty days, with over 97 billion reports collected
globally over March 2013.
14 June – The South China Morning Post says the NSA hacked Hong Kong and China servers.
16 June
– The Guardian reports that US and UK intelligence spied on foreign
diplomats at the G20 summit in 2009. One of them being Russia’s Dmitry
Medvedev. The NSA is revealed to have bugged South Africa’s foreign
office and planned to spy on delegates at the Commonwealth Heads of
Government Meeting in 2009.
British Ambassador David
Reddaway is summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry to officially
comment on the Guardian’s claims about its tapping of the Turkish
delegation led by Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek at the G20 summit in
2009.
19 June – The New York times
accuses Skype of creating a program in 2008 that gave intelligence
access to its customers’ message exchange. As of 2011, over 633 million
users were registered with Skype.
21 June
– The Guardian shed some light on spying programs, such as Prism-like
Tempura, run by the British-based GCHQ. The Government Communications
Headquarters collected phone data of an estimated 600 million people
daily. The tempura program let the GCHQ access communications of two
billion Internet users.
27 June – It
emerges that the Obama administration kept running the Internet-traffic
assessing Stellar Wind program well past George Bush’s presidency.
The
Guardian reports that by December 2012 a special NSA unit had scooped
up data on the Internet traffic of over a trillion users.
20 June
– The Guardian says the NSA spied on 38 foreign embassies and
diplomatic missions. The list of tapped embassies includes those of
Middle East countries, as well as France, Italy, Greece and several US
allies such as Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India, and Turkey.
Germany’s
Der Spiegel claims US intelligence was tapping a total of 20 million
phone calls and 10 million internet connections in Germany every single
day.
28 June – UK journalist Glenn Greenwald claims he possesses documents that prove the US can process a billion of phone calls a day.
2 July
– Turkish foreign office summons a high-ranking US official to question
him about the alleged US-run intelligence program that was said to have
bugged diplomatic missions.
4 July –
Le Mond reveals that French intelligence was monitoring the majority of
phone calls and Internet traffic in the country for two years.
6 July
– Brazil’s O Globo newspaper publishes an article by Glenn Greenwald
that deals with NSA’s Fairview, a secret mass surveillance program that
collected phone and traffic data across Brazil.
9 July
–Greenwald’s second article in O Globo reveals that the US spied on
citizens of most Latin American countries, including Mexico, Venezuela,
Columbia, Ecuador, Argentina, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras,
Paraguay, Chile, Peru, and Salvador.
10 July
– The Washington Post releases information on PRISM's brother called
Upstream, which collects from the fiber-optic cable networks.
20 July
– Der Spiegel claims German intelligence was cooperating with US spies,
lobbying hard against tougher data protection rules to have more leeway
for surveillance.
31 July – The
Guardian publishes a presentation on NSA’s surveillance program
Xkeyscore that has 500 servers around the world and can track virtually
every step made on the Internet. The paper says it collected data on 1-2
billion connections daily.
1 August – The NSA is revealed to have paid GCHQ a total of $155 million from 2010-2013, since UK laws allowed for wider surveillance.
2 August
– Brazil’s Epoca publishes information that implicates US diplomats in
using intelligence data to gain an edge on UN partners at the Iran
nuclear talks and the Summit of Americas in 2009.
Die
Sueddeutsche Zeitung reveals that seven communication giants, including
BT, Vodafone, and Verizon Business, let the GCHQ access their
fiber-optic cables networks and analyze some 600 million phone calls a
day.
9 August – Journalists find out
that NSA guidelines allow it to log onto US servers without a warrant.
Senator Ron Wyden admits the NSA could not tell the number of Americans
they have been spying on.
15 August –
The Washington Post reports 2776 incidents of the NSA violating its own
surveillance rules from March 2011 until March 2012. It says NSA
employees used the agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on their
love interests.
21 August – The NSA
declassifies three secret court rulings that prove the agency collected
an average of 56,000 emails a year that were sent by American nationals
not suspected of terrorist activities.
Ecuador's President Rafael Correa claims several Latin American countries have been spied on,
although he doesn’t name whose intelligence stood behind this mass
surveillance. The president says the unnamed spies intercepted emails
and phone calls and stresses he has enough evidence that government
communications have also been tapped.
26 August
– The Independent announces that Britain runs a secret
Internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept data from
fiber-optic cables passing through the region. However Glenn Greenwald
later denies this information may have stemmed from former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
29 August –
The Washington Post says US intelligence paid tens of millions of
dollars to communications companies for clandestine access to their
fiber-optic cables networks.
The US secret surveillance
budget is estimated at $52.6 billion. Primary targets are revealed to
be Russia, China, Iran, Cuba and Israel.
30 August
– US intelligence is accused of carrying out 231 cyber-attacks over
2011, every third of them targeting servers in Russia, China, Iran and
North Korea.
August 31 - Der Spiegel reports that NSA hacked into the secure internal communications systems of the Aljazeera TV network.
United States of Espionage: timeline of NSA's blatant spy programs. Part 2
After
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the US National
Security Agency (NSA) spied on its world's foes and allies, major world
powers started to summon US ambassadors and demanded explanations. Here
is Part Two of the timeline of the NSA's blatant spy programs from
September to October 2013.
September 1 -The Washington Post reports that the NSA has been spying on Pakistan, a US ally, more than on any other country.
Journalist
Glenn Greenwald reveals that the NSA wiretapped the phone calls of
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Brazilian President Dilma
Rousseff. The Brazilian leader cancels her official visit to the United
States.
September 5 - It’s been reported that the NSA cracked the private data encryption codes of millions of web users.
September 7 -
Der Spiegel reports that the NSA accessed smartphone data from all
leading makers. Both mass smartphone surveillance and spying on
individual smartphones was practiced.
September 9 -
Brazil’s Fantastico reports that the NSA infiltrated the computer
networks of the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, the French Foreign
Ministry and the SWIFT banking system, disproving allegations of the
NSA’s non-involvement in corporate espionage.
September 11 -
The US and Israeli secret services publish a memorandum on NSA data
sharing with Israel. The NASA refuses to disclose how many Americans the
Israeli intelligence agencies wanted to check.
September 16 -
It emerges that the NSA has been monitoring VISA and Mastercard credit
card transactions. Britain’s GCHQ says that plenty of "irrelevant"
private data was collected along the way.
September 17 -
NSA spy scandal breaks out in Belgium. Der Spiegel reports attempts by
Britain’s GCHQ to infiltrate the Belgian telecommunication company
Belgacom. Not only the NSA but also Israel’s secret services have
possibly been involved in cyber espionage against Belgacom. Ten years
ago, the company acquired an Israeli-based technology that enabled
foreign secret agencies to intercept its client data.
September 23 -
The Hindu newspaper accuses the US secret services of accessing data on
India’s nuclear and space programs and domestic policy. India’s embassy
and UN mission in the United States have both been under surveillance.
September 25 -Investigative
reporter Glenn Greenwald comes up with revelations showing that
opponents of the use of drones in the war on terrorism are referred to
in NSA documents as a "threat."
September 28 - The New York Times reports that the NSA uses people’s private data to create detailed graphs of their social connections.
September 30 -
The Guardian reports that the NSA stores the online metadata of
millions of Internet users for up to a year, regardless of whether they
are connected to a terrorist target. The newspaper cites expert Jeff
Jarvis as saying that the NSA monitors about half of all communications
on the Web.
October 4 -The NSA and the GCHQ are accused of attempting to compromise the TOR computer networks that users to protect their data.
October 7 -The
Fantastico reports that Canada’s secret services spied on Brazil’s
Energy and Natural Resources Ministry in favor of Canadian companies.
October 14 -The Washington Post reports that the NSA has been sifting through 250 million e-mail lists.
October 16 - It’s been reported that the CIA uses NSA data to prepare operations involving unmanned aircraft.
October 20 -
Der Spiegel unveils information showing that the NSA was spying on
Mexico’s former President Felipe Calderon and Cabinet ministers.
October 21 -
Le Monde reports massive spying on French citizens, diplomats and
companies by the NSA. The agency intercepted some 70.3 million items of
French telephone data and was spying on French diplomats in the United
States.
October 23 -
Le Monde’s revelations and a scandal around German Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s phone being tapped by the NSA spark calls for a review of the
cooperation agreement between the US and European intelligence agencies.
October 24 - The Guardian reports that the NSA was eavesdropping on the phone calls of 35 world leaders.
L’Espresso reports that the NSA and GCHQ have spied on the Italian government, Italian companies and millions of Italians.
October 26 -
Allegations emerge that Angela Merkel has been wiretapped by the NSA
since 2002 and that a special intelligence center was created at the US
embassy in Berlin. The White House denies that a wiretap of Merkel had
President Barack Obama’s personal approval.
October 28 -
It’s been reported that the NSA intercepted 60.5 million phone calls,
texts and e-mails in Spain between December 19, 2012 and January 8 this
year. Spanish politicians and Cabinet members were among those whose
phones were tapped.
Details
US President Barack Obama has known since as long as 2010 that the NSA tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone.
-
In 2010, NSA Director Keith Alexander personally informed Obama about a
secret operation targeting Merkel. A well-informed US intelligence
source told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper on condition of anonymity that
Obama "not only did not stop the operation, but he also ordered it to
continue."
- The
NSA read Merkel’s sms messages and eavesdropped on her phone calls. Only
the stationary phone in her bureau in the Federal Chancellery was
inaccessible, according to the Bild am Sonntag.
- Obama apologized and assured Merkel that he had been unaware of the phone bugging or he would have ordered to cease it.
-
In 2002, the NSA put Merkel, back then an opposition leader, on its
European Target List. Later, she was assigned the code-name "GE
Chancellor Merkel". The Bild am Sonntag claims that a joint intelligence
unit of NSA and CIA at the US embassy in Berlin monitored cellphone
communications in the government quarter.
In a fresh phone bugging revelation, former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi
said that ten years ago when he had been President of the European
Commission, his phone had been tapped by US secret services. "My tone of
voice and my speech peculiarities were inserted into some database, so
all my phone calls were intercepted irrespective of the telephone I was
using," Interfax quoted Prod as saying in an interview.
France
regularly shares raw intelligence data with the United States Britain
under a trilateral data sharing deal, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper
reports, citing information leaked by former CIA contractor Edward
Snowden.
Also, France has an intelligence sharing
treaty codenamed Lustre with five English-speaking countries, the
so-called Five Eyes club that comprises the United States, Britain,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They share electronic surveillance
data but pledged not to spy on each other.
The United States used Britain’s Menwith Hill
spy base in North Yorkshire to wiretap Merkel and other world leaders.
Menwith Hill is an Air Force base and Europe’s largest electronic
surveillance base with 33 antennas. The NSA used it to process the
intercepted phone and e-mail data.
There were around 80
NSA-CIA intelligence units in the world in 2010, most of them dating
from as far as the 1970s, including 19 in Europe – in Paris, Madrid,
Rome, Prague and Geneva and also in Berlin and Frankfurt am Mein, Der
Spiegel reports.
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