ANNEX 7: THE SNOWDEN ALLEGATIONS
MUSCULAR
6.
The MUSCULAR programme was said to be a joint GCHQ and NSA project which
intercepted internal fibre optic cables used by Google and Yahoo, to transmit
unencrypted data between their data centres.5 During a 30-day period in 2012-2013
it was said that 181 million records were sent from a British collection point back to
the USA via this programme.6
DISHFIRE
7.
Slides relating to this programme describe the collection of almost 200 million text
messages per day in 2011 by NSA from around the world. Slide 5 describes why
SMS is regarded as so useful; they contain metadata and “metacontent” (content
derived metadata), the latter includes such “gems” as notifications relating to credit
card transactions and flight plans which can enhance analytics.7
OPTIC NERVE
8.
Under this programme Yahoo webcam images were said to be intercepted by GCHQ.
In one 6 month period in 2008 images were collected from 1.8 million Yahoo user
accounts globally. The programme saved one image every five seconds and users
were “unselected”, i.e., the collection was in bulk rather than targeted. Between 3%
and 11% of images were said to involve “undesirable nudity”. This programme was
also used to trial facial recognition technology.8
MYSTIC and RETRO
9.
The NSA programme referred to as MYSTIC was described as a voice interception
programme which used buffering to record an entire country’s telephone calls and
enable access for a month after the call took place. The RETRO tool, short for
retrospective retrieval, was said to enable the retrieval of calls up to thirty days in the
past.9
Bulk Processing tools
10.
Under the FASCIA programme the NSA was said to track the movements of mobile
phones by collecting location data as people move around. Almost 5 billion mobile
phone location records were logged per day.
11.
A data sorting tool called CO-TRAVELER was said to look for unknown associates of
known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.10
12.
PREFER was said to be the analytic tool used to carry out analysis of the text
messages collected via the DISHFIRE programme outlined above. It was able to
5
6
7
8
9
10
https://www.eff.org/document/2013-10-30-wapo-muscular-smiley
https://www.eff.org/document/2013-10-30-wapo-muscular.
https://www.eff.org/document/2013-11-04-wapo-windstop.
https://www.eff.org/document/2013-11-04-wapo-sso-overview.
https://www.eff.org/document/20140116-guard-dishfire-presentation.
https://www.eff.org/document/20140227-guard-gchq-optic-nerve.
https://www.eff.org/document/20140318-wapo-description-data-collection-under-mystic.
https://www.eff.org/document/20140318-wapo-adding-another-country-mystic-program.
https://www.eff.org/document/20131210-wapo-cotraveler-overview.
331