The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle

Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley, The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle. The Intercept, 19 February 2015. “American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.”

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Operation Socialist: The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco

Ryan Gallagher, Operation Socialist: The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco. The // Intercept, 13 December 2014. “Based on new documents from the Snowden archive and interviews with sources familiar with the malware investigation at Belgacom’s networks, The Intercept and its partners [Dutch and Belgian newspapers NRC Handelsblad and De Standaard] have established that the attack on Belgacom was more aggressive and far-reaching than previously thought. It occurred in stages between 2010 and 2011, each time penetrating deeper into Belgacom’s systems, eventually compromising the very core of the company’s networks.”

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Operation Auroragold: How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide

Ryan Gallagher, Operation Auroragold: How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide. The Intercept, 4 December 2014. “According to documents contained in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance.”

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ACLU’s NSA Documents Database

ACLU’s NSA Documents Database. 3 April 2014. “The public debate over our government’s surveillance programs has reached remarkable heights since the first set of NSA disclosures in June 2013 based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Since then, additional disclosures by both the press and government have illuminated our government’s vast and invasive surveillance apparatus. These documents stand as primary source evidence of our government’s interpretation of its authority to engage in sweeping surveillance activities at home and abroad, and how it carries out that surveillance. The ACLU hopes to facilitate this debate by making these documents more easily accessible and understandable….  We will update the database with new documents as they become available to the public.”

Timeline of Edward Snowden’s revelations

Joshua Eaton and Ben Piven, Timeline of Edward Snowden’s revelations. Al Jazeera. First stories published on 5 June 2013. Al Jazeera’s timeline of Edward Snowden’s NSA surveillance revelations. The information is from the media outlets that first reported the stories.