title: ReactOS

text: Axel Rietschin, who is a kernel engineer at Microsoft, claimed that he recognized some specific bits in the ReactOS kernel that are unlikely to result from a clean room reimplementation. He suggests that the project took source code from the Windows Research Kernel, which was licensed to universities and has been leaked multiple times. Internal data structures and variable names have the exact same name in both ReactOS and the research kernel.


title: ReactOS

text: Starting in 2006, the ReactOS project participated in several Google Summers of Code. For example, in the GSoC 2011, ReactOS mentored a student project which integrated lwIP into the network stack. ReactOS has to date participated six times in GSoC: 2006, 2011, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.


title: ReactOS

text: Between 2007 and 2015, Russian ReactOS contributors representing the ReactOS Foundation made efforts at lobbying the Russian federal government. , these efforts have not yielded government support for ReactOS, and the Russia-based ReactOS Foundation has been dissolved since November 2015.


title: ReactOS

text: On 1 May 2012, a €30,000 funding campaign was started to finance additional development projects. At the end of the year, approximately 50% of the funding goal was achieved and it was decided to continue the funding campaign without deadlines. The money went to "ReactOS Deutschland e. V.". As the tax law in Germany for this form of a registered voluntary association ("Eingetragener Verein") makes it problematic to pay developers directly; indirect possibilities like stipends were evaluated.


title: ReactOS

text: When ReactOS was awarded as Project of the Month on SourceForge on June 2013, a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter was announced in an interview with the project's coordinator, Aleksey Bragin. On 23 December 2013 the announced project was revealed as a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of US$120,000 was started. The "Thorium Core Cloud Desktop" dubbed cloud computing service would use ReactOS as core and could allow the use of Windows compatible applications from mobile devices (like smartphones, tablets), workstations, or any other connected device. On 21 February 2014, fundraising ended short of the target amount, with $48,965 of $120,000 raised, resulting in no transferred money.


title: ReactOS

text: In April 2014, the ReactOS project announced an Indiegogo campaign to launch ReactOS Community Edition, a version of ReactOS based on the 0.4 release. The flexible funding campaign had a goal of US$50,000 with additional stretch goals beyond that. Development of ReactOS Community Edition would be community-centric, with ReactOS users voting and funding to decide which software and hardware drivers the project will aim to support. On 1 June 2014, the flexible crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo ended, raising $25,141 for the development of the community edition, and the voting process to support hardware and software was started shortly thereafter.


title: ReactOS

text: The ReactOS project organized a hackfest from 7 to 12 August 2015, in the German city of Aachen. The Hackfest resulted in many features being added to ReactOS.


title: ReactOS

text: The second hackfest was organized by the ReactOS project from 14 to 18 August 2017, in the German city of Cologne.


title: ReactOS

text: The third and fourth hackfests were organized by the ReactOS project from 16 to 21 August 2018 and from 15 to 20 August 2019 in Berlin respectively.


title: ReactOS

text: ReactOS is primarily written in C, with some elements, such as ReactOS Explorer and the sound stack, written in C++. The project compiles using both MinGW and Microsoft Visual Studio, and contributes to the development of the build systems used through the submission of patches to its components.


title: ReactOS

text: The developers aim to make the kernel and usermode application programming interface (API) more compatible with Windows NT version 5.2 (Windows Server 2003) and to add support for more applications and hardware, with plans to target newer versions of Windows as development matures. DirectX support is undertaken through ReactX, an in-house implementation. 2D and OpenGL 3D hardware-accelerated rendering is done natively, while other drawing functionality such as Direct3D is redirected to OpenGL as a stopgap solution, mostly using Wine's code such as WineD3D.


title: ReactOS

text: The development progress is influenced by the size of the development team and the level of experience among them. As an estimate of the effort required to implement Windows 7, Microsoft employed 1,000 or so developers, organized into 25 teams, with each team averaging 40 developers. , in the ReactOS entry in Ohloh, the page followed through the "Very large, active development team" link lists 33 developers who have contributed over a 12-month period and a cumulative total of 104 present and former users who have contributed code to the project via Apache Subversion since its inception. In his presentation at Hackmeeting 2009 in Milan, ReactOS developer Michele C. noted that most of the developers learn about Windows architecture while working on ReactOS and have no prior knowledge.


title: ReactOS

text: While ReactOS targets currently mainly the x86/AMD64 PC platform, an effort to port to the ARM architecture was at one point "under way", while it did not produce much functionality and was abandoned along with a port to PowerPC, that is no longer actively maintained. Support for the Xbox and the NEC PC-9800, a variant IA-32 architecture, was added through the use of an architecture-specific HAL. Improved 64-bit support for ReactOS is "being worked on", however, development seems to be going slowly.


title: ReactOS

text: While ReactOS has the aim to build a Windows-compatible kernel as open-source software, much of the surrounding required functionality to create a complete OS is already available in the greater open-source ecosystem.


title: ReactOS

text: When available and possible, ReactOS therefore builds on and collaborates with already existing open-source projects.


title: ReactOS

text: Conversely, projects like Wine, and formerly Captive NTFS and Longene re-use the open-source ReactOS code-base as well.


title: ReactOS

text: On the hardware driver side, for instance the UniATA project provides Serial ATA drivers for ReactOS. The project has also experimented with using the FullFAT library in its rewrite of its FAT Installable File System. ReactOS makes use of the USB stack from Haiku both as a reference and as a foundation for its USB support. Mesa 3D provides OpenGL rendering.


title: ReactOS

text: ReactOS's network stack is built on the TCP portion of OSKit's port of the network stack in FreeBSD, along with an internally developed implementation for packet-oriented protocols like IP. Later, lwIP was integrated into the ReactOS network stack. Windows network services like LSASS, SAM, NETLOGON, and print spooling are already available as open-source alternative by the Samba/Samba TNG project. A fork of rdesktop is used as an implementation of a client software for Microsoft's proprietary Remote Desktop Protocol.


title: ReactOS

text: The ReactOS and the Wine projects share the goal to run binary Windows software natively and can therefore share many dependencies and development. ReactOS uses portions of the Wine project so that it can benefit from Wine's progress in implementing the Win32 API. While Wine's NTDLL, USER32, KERNEL32, GDI32, and ADVAPI32 components cannot be used directly by ReactOS due to architectural differences, code snippets of them and other parts can be shared between both projects. The kernel is developed by ReactOS separately as Wine relies here on existing Unix-like kernels.


title: ReactOS

text: Separately, the experimental "Arwinss" branch was created as an alternative means to improve USER32 and GDI32 support through an alternative implementation of the Win32 API. Whereas ReactOS's original Win32 subsystem was closely modeled after its equivalent in Windows, Arwinss combines the architecture of that subsystem with the corresponding implementation in Wine. To this end, Arwinss uses Wine's GDI32 and USER32 libraries with few changes to take fuller advantage of Wine's existing software compatibility. Arwinss also allows the user to optionally use a remote X server instead of a local display.


title: ReactOS

text: The Tango Desktop Project initiative provides open-source design guidelines and resources (as icons) for applications on desktop environments. FreeType is an open-source software development library, used to render text on to bitmaps and provides support for other font-related operations. The "KernelEx" project is a Windows-API extension and compatibility layer project, which provides open-source implementations of some Windows-APIs. Other contributing projects are MinGW, SYSLINUX, adns, ICU, GraphApp, Ext2, GNU FreeFont, DejaVu fonts, and Liberation fonts.


title: ReactOS

text: Various people have acknowledged ReactOS and the implications of having a viable open-source drop-in replacement for Windows. A 2004 article and interview of the German weekly magazine "Der Spiegel" describes ReactOS as directed at Windows users who want to renounce use of proprietary commercial software without having to switch to Linux. DistroWatch, a Linux distribution's monitoring Web site, also lists ReactOS and describes it as "a free and open-source operating system based on the best design principles found in the Windows NT architecture."


title: ReactOS

text: In his column for Free Software Magazine, David Sugar noted in 2006 that ReactOS would allow the use of applications depending on older versions of Windows whose APIs have been deprecated. He also recognized its potential to expand the total deployed base of free software, and as a resource for developers wanting to know undocumented Windows APIs in the course of writing portable applications. PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak remarked in 2008 that the Windows NT architecture had remained largely unchanged, making it an ideal candidate for cloning, and believed that ReactOS could be "a bigger threat than Linux to Microsoft's dominance". In response to Dvorak's column, ZDNet technology journalist Dana Blankenhorn noted in 2008 that a lack of corporate sponsors and partners had rendered the project harmless to Microsoft. Echoing this, Thom Holwerda of OSNews in 2009 categorized ReactOS under a family of hobby operating systems maintained only by small groups of developers working in their spare time, lacking the financial support of more mainstream operating systems and the legacy of formerly mainstream ones such as RISC OS.


title: ReactOS

text: In October 2015, a Network World review of ReactOS v0.3.17 noted "It's just like running Windows 2000" and praised the application package manager, a feature the original Windows is missing.


title: ReactOS

text: Jesse Smith from DistroWatch Weekly reviewed ReactOS v0.4.9, and noted that ReactOS "ultimately had a similar problem: limited hardware support" and is not yet a stable operating system.


title: ReactOS

text: The ReactOS Project won on the annual Seliger Youth Forum "The Best Presentation" award with 100,000 Russian rubles (~US$2700) in 2011, attended by Alexander Rechitskiy, one of the development team members.


title: ReactOS

text: ReactOS was a featured project on SourceForge for the weeks beginning on 27 February 2012, 25 April 2013, and several others. It was Project of the Month on SourceForge for June 2013 and February 2019.


title: Zack Ward

text: He is best known for his character Dave Scovil (Titus's stoner half-brother) on the FOX show "Titus" and as the bully Scut Farkus in the 1983 perennial Christmas movie "A Christmas Story". He has had guest roles on popular television series such as "NCIS", "Lost", and "Crossing Jordan," and roles in films such as "Almost Famous," "Transformers" and "Anne of Green Gables". He has appeared in the horror films "" and "Freddy vs. Jason". Ward also has had leading roles in "" and "Postal," and can be seen in "Alone in the Dark II" and "The Devil's Tomb".


title: Zack Ward

text: In 2014, Ward co-founded the film production company Grit Film Works with James Cullen Bressack. The first two films which he co-produced with Grit Film Works were the thriller "Bethany" and the horror film "Restoration".


title: Zack Ward

text: On February 15, 2022, it was announced that Ward would reprise his role as Scut Farkus in the "A Christmas Story" sequel, "A Christmas Story Christmas" for Warner Bros. Pictures and HBO Max.


title: Zack Ward

text: In August 2011, Ward sued Warner Bros. and Enesco over merchandising for "A Christmas Story" after the company authorized a figure resembling his Scut Farkus character from the film without his permission. It was revealed that when he signed on to play that character, he didn't receive any merchandising rights because of a mishap with his contract. The lawsuit was dropped in January 2012 after Warner Bros. revealed that the figurine showed a "generic face" that has been used on them since 2006 and that statute of limitations had ran out.


title: Zack Ward

text: In December 2012, Ward sued Warner Bros. again over his image after attending the annual "Christmas Story" charity fundraiser convention in Cleveland in November 2010 after a fan handed him a "Christmas Story" board game, playing cards, and calendar showing his face. The lawsuit was settled three days later.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: The Intruder is a 2019 American psychological thriller film directed by Deon Taylor and written by David Loughery. The film stars Michael Ealy and Meagan Good as a couple who buy a house in the country, only to realize its previous owner (Dennis Quaid) refuses to let it go. It was released in the United States on May 3, 2019, by Sony Pictures Releasing, receiving generally negative reviews from critics. However, it was a commercial success, grossing $40 million worldwide against its $8 million budget.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: Scott (Michael Ealy) and Annie Howard (Meagan Good) purchase a Napa Valley house called "Foxglove" from its previous owner, Charlie Peck (Dennis Quaid). Charlie explains his wife, Ellen, passed away from cancer two years earlier and he will soon be moving to Florida to live with his daughter, Cassidy. Scott is instantly irritated by Charlie who appears overly friendly with Annie and keeps dropping by unannounced.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: Scott and Annie invite their friend Mike and his wife over to spend the night. When Mike goes outside for a cigarette, he senses he is being watched. The following morning, he notices a cigarette burn on the seat of his luxury car that wasn't there previously. Charlie continues to show up without an invitation; he explains he is not moving to Florida just yet, and is staying at the Royal Hotel in town. Tensions rise between Scott and Annie due to Scott's coldness toward Charlie, and it is also revealed that, before getting married, he had cheated on her with a colleague.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: When a neighbour tells Scott that Charlie's wife killed herself with one of Charlie's shotguns, Scott asks Mike to investigate him. Meanwhile, Charlie has developed an obsession with Annie and begins visiting her at home when Scott is not there. One morning, while Scott is out jogging, a truck runs into him from behind; it turns out that Charlie was the driver. Mike uncovers that Charlie had gone into debt and was facing legal trouble and therefore was forced to sell the house to Scott and Annie. While Scott is in the hospital, Charlie shows up at the house, and he and Annie have dinner. Mike goes to check on her and is confronted by Charlie, who declares he has a chance to get back all he lost and must get rid of Scott. Charlie then kills Mike with an axe.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: The next morning, Scott contacts Cassidy, who has since changed her name, but she hangs up when Scott mentions her father. Scott also discovers Charlie has never stayed at the Royal. Charlie appears in the house and passionately declares his feelings for Annie. She claims she is feeling ill and calmly asks Charlie to leave, which he does. Annie then goes upstairs and finds a hidden door behind the linen closet, leading to Charlie's underground cellar, where he has been living the whole time since selling the house. Meanwhile, Scott is driving home and receives a call back from Cassidy who explains Charlie is a pathological liar who murdered her mother after she threatened a divorce.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: Back at the house, Charlie discovers that Annie has found his cellar. He knocks her unconscious, carries her upstairs and begins assaulting her. When Scott returns home, Charlie ambushes him and throws him over the hallway balcony. Charlie begins strangling Annie, but Scott reappears. The two men struggle and Annie stabs Charlie in the back. Charlie staggers away to the cellar, where he retrieves a shotgun.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: Scott and Annie hide behind the bedroom door as Charlie searches the house for them. When Charlie enters the room, Scott strikes him in the head with a baseball bat and seizes the rifle. Lying on the floor bleeding, Charlie taunts Scott by saying Scott would never dare shoot him. As they stand over Charlie, Annie calls 911 and informs the dispatcher that her husband has just shot an intruder. Horrified, Charlie screams, "You don't deserve Foxglove!" Scott replies, "Go to hell," and shoots Charlie, finally killing him.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: In May 2018, Ealy, Good and Quaid all signed onto the project. It was then announced that the worldwide distribution rights had been acquired by Screen Gems at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, after production had been completed under the title "Motivated Seller".


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: "The Intruder" was released in the United States on May 3, 2019. It was previously set for an April 26, 2019 release, but was pushed back a week to separate from "". The film was released on Blu-Ray and DVD on July 30, 2019.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: "The Intruder" grossed $35.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $5.2 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $40.6 million, against a production budget of $8 million.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: In the United States and Canada, "The Intruder" was released alongside "Long Shot" and "UglyDolls", and was projected to gross $9–16 million from 2,222 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $3.9 million on its first day, including $865,000 from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $11 million, finishing second, behind holdover "". The film grossed $6.6 million in its second weekend, finishing in fourth.


title: The Intruder (2019 film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, ""The Intruder" might appeal to fans of shout-at-the-screen cinema, but this thriller's ludicrous plot robs it of suspense – and undermines Dennis Quaid's suitably over-the-top performance." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale, while those at PostTrak gave it 2.5 out of 5 stars and a 44% "definite recommend."


title: Mariska Veres

text: Maria Elizabeth Ender, better known as Mariska Veres () (1 October 1947 – 2 December 2006), was a Dutch singer who was best known as the lead singer of the rock group Shocking Blue. Described as being similar to a young Cher, she was known for her sultry voice, eccentric performances, and her striking appearance which featured kohl-rimmed eyes, high cheekbones, and long jet black hair, which was actually a wig.


title: Mariska Veres

text: Veres was born in The Hague, in the Netherlands. Her father was the Hungarian Romani violinist Lajos Veres (1912–1981), and her mother Maria Ender (1912–1986) was of French and Russian heritage.


title: Mariska Veres

text: Veres began her career as a singer in 1963 with the guitar band "Les Mysteres". In 1964 the band recorded an EP (GTB-label, 10 copies only) with Veres singing on side 1: "Summertime" (solo) and "Someone" (a duet). In 2010 the EP was re-released by record club Platenclub Utrecht (PLUT 009). In 1965, she sang with "the Bumble Bees", and then with "the Blue Fighters", "Danny and his Favourites" and "General Four". Later in 1966 she sang with the Motowns with whom she also played organ.


title: Mariska Veres

text: In 1968, she was invited to join Shocking Blue to replace lead singer Fred de Wilde, who had to join the army. In 1969/1970 Shocking Blue gained worldwide fame with the hit single "Venus". The month of their arrival in the United States gossip columnist Earl Wilson referred to Veres as a 'beautiful busty girl'.


title: Mariska Veres

text: When Shocking Blue split up on 1 June 1974, Veres continued in a solo career. Her singles "Take Me High" (1975) and "Lovin' You" (1976) were popular mainly in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. She also released the singles "Tell It Like It Is" (1975), a cover version of Dusty Springfield's "Little By Little" (1976), and "Too Young" (1978).


title: Mariska Veres

text: Shocking Blue reunited in 1984. This comeback turned out to be successful, but one of the other original members, Robbie van Leeuwen, stepped back from the group, partly because he had moved to Luxembourg but also due to the success of Bananarama's cover of "Venus".


title: Mariska Veres

text: Veres started the jazz group "The Shocking Jazz Quintet" in 1993, and recorded an album ("Shocking You") with pop songs from the 1960s and 1970s, now in a jazz version. From 1993 to 2006 she performed in yet another reincarnation of Shocking Blue (recorded the songs "Body and Soul" and "Angel", both produced by former member Robbie van Leeuwen), and also recorded an album with Andrei Serban in 2003, named "Gipsy Heart", going back to her Romani roots.


title: Mariska Veres

text: A version of "Venus" was posthumously released in 2007, a few months after her death, recorded with pianist/bandleader Dolf de Vries (on the album "Another Touch"). Veres recorded "Venus" four times: with "Shocking Blue" (1969), with the "Mariska Veres Shocking Jazz Quintet" (1993), with "Formula Diablo" (in English/Spanish, 1997), and with "Dolf de Vries" (a lounge version of "Venus", 2005–2006).


title: Mariska Veres

text: Veres had a long-term relationship with guitarist , but never married or had children. Reminiscing to the Belgian magazine "Flair", she remarked about her early fame: "I was just a painted doll (back in those days), nobody could ever reach me. Nowadays, I am more open to people".


title: Mariska Veres

text: Veres died of gallbladder cancer on 2 December 2006 at age 59, just three weeks after the disease had been detected.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: Thomas Patrick Payne (born April 2, 1984) is a United States Army Delta Force sergeant major and instructor, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during a hostage rescue mission in an area of northern Iraq controlled by the Islamic State. Payne is currently the only recipient of the Medal of Honor for Operation Inherent Resolve.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: Payne was born on April 2, 1984, and grew up in Batesburg-Leesville and Lugoff, South Carolina, graduating from Lugoff-Elgin High School in 2002. His father is a policeman, and he has two brothers, one of whom also serves in the Army and the other in the United States Air Force.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: After high school, Payne enlisted in the United States Army as an infantryman on July 25, 2002, completing One Station Unit Training, the Basic Airborne Course, and the Ranger Indoctrination Program (now known as the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program) throughout 2002 and 2003 at Fort Benning, Georgia.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: Payne was then assigned as a rifleman to Company A, 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, where he also served as a sniper and sniper team leader until November 2007, where he then completed a specialized selection course for assignment to the United States Army Special Operations Command's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment – Delta at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Since then, he has served within USASOC as a special operations team member, assistant team sergeant, team sergeant, and instructor.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: In 2010, then-Staff Sergeant Payne was wounded in Afghanistan from a grenade blast, from which he made a complete recovery and eventually returned to duty.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: In 2012, then-Sergeant First Class Payne and his then teammate, Master Sergeant Kevin Foutz, won the Best Ranger Competition in Fort Benning, Georgia.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: Payne has been deployed 17 times in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation New Dawn, Operation Inherent Resolve, and Operation Resolute Support, and to the United States Africa Command area of responsibility.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: Payne is a graduate of numerous military schools and courses, including Basic Airborne Course; Ranger Indoctrination Program; Ranger School; Sniper Course; Basic Leader Course; Basic Demolition Course; Advanced Demolition Course; Advanced Land Navigation; Survive, Evasion, Resistance and Escape; Free Fall Parachutist; Advanced Leader Course; Jumpmaster Course; Free Fall Jumpmaster Course; Joint Military Tandem Master Course; Senior Leader Course; Defense Language Institute (French); Special Forces Sniper Course; and Joint Special Operations Senior Enlisted Academy.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: As of June 2022, Payne, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Swenson, Sergeant Major Matthew O. Williams and Master Sergeant Earl D. Plumlee are the only Medal of Honor recipients still on active duty.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: Payne was awarded the Medal of Honor on September 11, 2020, for his actions on October 22, 2015, during a hostage rescue at an Islamic State prison compound in the north of the town of Hawija, Kirkuk Province, Iraq, in support of Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve. The joint operation, conducted with the Kurdish CTG (Counter-Terrorism Group), resulted in the rescue of 70 Iraqi prisoners with one American casualty, Delta Force Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler. Payne received the Medal of Honor from President Donald Trump during a ceremony at the White House. He is the first living Delta Force member to receive the Medal of Honor, the third Delta Force recipient after Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart who died in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, and the first Medal of Honor recipient for Operation Inherent Resolve.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: The task force prioritized the hostage rescue mission to prevent the execution of 70 prisoners after learning that new graves had been dug at the complex. The mission, which included Kurdish soldiers, commenced in the pre-dawn darkness with the landing of the team in CH-47 Chinook helicopters. The Kurdish troops unsuccessfully tried to blast open the prison wall with explosives which caused the enemy to open fire almost immediately. The Americans entered the complex by climbing over the wall and Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler was killed by ISIS gunfire. Payne and the team suppressed resistance at one prison building, cut the locks on cell doors, and freed 37 hostages.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: An intense firefight was underway in a second building, which had started to burn. Payne and other US soldiers responded to radio calls for assistance and aided Kurdish soldiers who were pinned down at the second building. Amid gunfire, Payne and another soldier climbed a ladder to the roof of the building but could not gain entry. From the roof, they engaged enemy forces on the ground with gunfire and grenades before returning to the ground to seek another entry point after an ISIS fighter detonated a suicide vest to try to collapse the building. Payne and a Kurdish commando entered the burning building and faced intense gunfire from enemy combatants in a back room. Payne cut one door lock but retreated due to the heavy smoke and gunfire. A Kurdish commando tried to cut the second lock but failed. Payne entered the area again and cut the last lock, freeing 30 additional prisoners. As the building was collapsing, the order was given to evacuate. Payne stayed to direct everyone out, being the last person to exit after re-entering twice to ensure that no one was left behind. Payne and the team then formed a protective barrier as the hostages ran to the extraction helicopters.


title: Thomas Payne (soldier)

text: Payne graduated from Norwich University in 2017 with a Bachelor of Science degree in strategic studies and defense analysis. As of June 2021, Payne is stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and three children. His wife, Alison, is a nurse who served at St. Joseph's Hospital in Long Island, where she helped care for patients during the COVID-19 outbreak between April and May 2020. They met at Lake Murray while he was recovering from his wounds in South Carolina from a grenade blast in Afghanistan in 2010.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Łukasz Marek Fabiański (born 18 April 1985) is a Polish professional footballer who plays as a goalkeeper for club West Ham United. He also played for the Poland national team, until his retirement in 2021.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Having begun his career at Legia Warsaw, Fabiański joined Arsenal for £2.1 million in 2007, and was mainly used as back-up, but played as the club won the 2014 FA Cup Final. On the expiration of his contract in 2014, he joined Swansea City, and played 150 total matches in four years. He then signed for West Ham for £7 million.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: A full international for Poland since 2006, Fabiański represented his country on 57 occasions. He was included in the squads for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, UEFA Euro 2008, Euro 2016, the 2018 FIFA World Cup and Euro 2020.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Fabiański was born in Kostrzyn nad Odrą, Lubusz Voivodeship. After starting his career with Polonia Słubice, Fabiański joined the noted independent football academy MSP Szamotuły at age 14, where he honed his footballing skills. Fabiański then was signed in the 2004–05 season by Lech Poznań.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: In the winter of 2005, Fabiański was signed by Legia Warsaw, where he competed with Artur Boruc for a place in the team. After Boruc was sold to Celtic, Fabiański took over as starting goalkeeper on 24 July 2005 in a match against Arka Gdynia, which ended 0–0. The following season, he helped Legia win the 2005–06 Ekstraklasa. He started all 30 matches of the campaign, in which he conceded 17 goals.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: In the 2005–06 and 2006–07 seasons, his performances led to him being awarded the "Football Oscar" for the best goalkeeper in the Ekstraklasa.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 8 May 2007, Fabiański underwent medical tests in London after Arsenal agreed a transfer fee with Legia Warsaw worth approximately £2.1 million. The move was confirmed on 11 May 2007 by Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. Fabiański formally signed for Arsenal on 26 May with a long-term contract. He made his debut for the club in a 2–0 League Cup win over Newcastle United on 25 September 2007. His league debut followed later that season against Derby County.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: In Fabiański's early Arsenal career, two of his most notable appearances came in the 5–1 defeat to rivals Tottenham Hotspur in the 2007–08 League Cup semi-final and the first leg of the 2009–10 UEFA Champions League second round match with Porto. Fabiański received criticism for conceding soft goals in the Porto match as he scored an own goal and was blamed for the second goal after picking up a backpass from Sol Campbell, with Porto scoring from the resulting free-kick. In January 2010, Arsène Wenger stated that Łukasz Fabiański could become one of the best goalkeepers in the Premier League.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Fabiański played the last four matches for Arsenal in the 2009–10 season after top-choice goalkeeper Manuel Almunia suffered a wrist injury. He was criticised for conceding soft goals in the defeats to Wigan Athletic and Blackburn Rovers, but kept clean sheets in the matches at home to Manchester City and Fulham.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Fabiański started the 2010–11 season as Arsenal's second-choice goalkeeper. On 21 September 2010, he made his first start of the season in a League Cup match against neighbours Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane, which Arsenal won 4–1 after extra time. Fabiański almost cost the match for Arsenal as he failed to stop Robbie Keane's long-range effort, despite getting a hand to the shot. After the match, he revealed he was disappointed. He had a solid match in his second match of the season replacing the injured Manuel Almunia one week later in a UEFA Champions League 3–1 away win against Partizan. He saved Cléo's second penalty of the match in the second half to deny Partizan a lifeline. He later turned Ivica Iliev's effort around the post from point-blank range just before the final whistle. Arsène Wenger later commented that Fabiański had a "faultless" match and they finally saw the player who they usually see in training. He kept his first clean sheet in a win over Manchester City, where he made many saves in a match that ended 3–0. He was later named man of the match on an Arsenal.com poll after a brilliant display to keep Arsenal in the match. After the City match, Wenger admitted he could well become the club's number one goalkeeper after impressive displays in the matches since the Partizan match.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 7 November 2010, Fabiański was widely criticised for an error that lead to the only goal as Arsenal lost at home to Newcastle United. However, he produced a strong display to keep a clean sheet in the next Premier League match, against Wolverhampton Wanderers, in which he managed to prevent a draw with a last-minute save, and then initiating a counter-attack with a long throw of the ball that led to another Arsenal goal. After the Wolves match, Arsenal played Everton, where Fabiański received the man of the match award from Sky Sports.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Fabiański was injured for Arsenal's crucial match with Manchester United but returned for the equally important match with London rivals Chelsea, making many crucial saves in helping Arsenal to win 3–1. On 5 January 2011, he suffered a season-ending shoulder injury as he was warming up with the help of Wojciech Szczęsny, which ruled him out for the remainder of the 2010–11 season. During this period, Szczęsny established himself as Arsenal's first choice goalkeeper ahead of his Polish compatriot.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Fabiański spent the 2011–12 season as backup to Wojciech Szczęsny, making his first appearance against Shrewsbury Town in the League Cup.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 6 December 2011, Fabiański was selected to start in Arsenal's UEFA Champions League group stage match against Olympiacos, but was substituted out after 25 minutes following a knee injury.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Injuries limited Fabiański's appearances during the 2012–13 season, where he made only four Premier League appearances as back-up to Wojciech Szczęsny. In March 2013, after Szczęsny was dropped, Fabiański started in goal in the second-leg of Arsenal's UEFA Champions League tie against Bayern Munich. He kept a clean sheet as Arsenal won 2–0 and retained his place in the team to make his first Premier League start of the season away against Swansea City on 16 March 2013, again keeping a clean sheet in a 2–0 win. Fabiański started in Arsenal's next three league matches against Reading, West Bromwich Albion and Norwich City. However, an injury sustained in the match against Norwich by Fabiański allowed Szczęsny to return to the starting line-up and reclaim his position as first-choice goalkeeper.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: During the 2013–14 season, Fabiański was used as Arsenal's starting goalkeeper in FA Cup and League Cup matches, with Szczęsny remaining first-choice in Premier League and UEFA Champions League matches.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 19 February 2014, Fabiański came on as a substitute in the 37th minute of a 2–0 Champions League home defeat against Bayern Munich, after Szczęsny was sent off for a foul on Arjen Robben. With Szczęsny suspended, Fabiański was in the starting line-up for the second leg and saved a late penalty from Bayern's Thomas Müller.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 12 April, Fabiański saved penalties from Gary Caldwell and Jack Collison in an FA Cup semi-final shootout victory over Wigan Athletic. He made his only Premier League appearance of the season in the last match on 11 May, keeping a clean sheet in a 2–0 away win that caused his opponents Norwich City to be relegated. Six days later, Fabiański started for Arsenal in the 2014 FA Cup Final as they defeated Hull City 3–2 after extra time at Wembley Stadium.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 29 May 2014, it was announced that Fabiański would join fellow Premier League side Swansea City on a free transfer when his Arsenal contract expired on 1 July. He said of the transfer, "The main reason I came to Swansea was because I want to be the number one goalkeeper." He made his competitive debut for the club on 16 August, a 2–1 win against Manchester United at Old Trafford in the first match of the Premier League season. On 7 December 2014, Fabiański was sent off in Swansea's 1–3 loss at West Ham United for a foul on Diafra Sakho.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 11 May 2015, Fabiański kept a clean sheet and was named man of the match in a 1–0 win against Arsenal on his return to the Emirates Stadium. On 6 July, Fabiański signed a new four-year contract with Swansea, which would keep him at the club until June 2019.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Fabiański played all 38 of Swansea's Premier League games of 2017–18 and was voted Player of the Season by the club's supporters. His performances did not prevent the club from ending the season 18th and they were relegated to the Championship.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 20 June 2018, Premier League club West Ham United announced the transfer of Fabiański for £7 million. He signed a three-year contract with the club. Fabiański, the first Pole to play first-team football for West Ham, was installed as first-choice 'keeper at the start of the 2018–19 season. On 4 December 2018, Fabiański saved his first penalty as a West Ham goalkeeper, saving Joe Ralls' effort in a 3–1 win against Cardiff City. For his performances throughout the season, during which he was ever-present, he was named Hammer of the Year.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: In September 2019, he suffered a hip injury. During his absence, Roberto and David Martin deputised for Fabiański.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: On 12 January 2022, Fabianski made his 300th Premier League appearance in a 2–0 victory over Norwich City, the first player from Poland to reach this landmark.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Having represented Poland regularly at under-21 level, Fabiański's performances for Legia Warsaw saw him soon making his debut for the senior international team in a friendly against Saudi Arabia on 29 March 2006.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Fabiański was included in Poland's squad for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, serving as back-up to Artur Boruc and Tomasz Kuszczak. During the qualifying campaign for the UEFA Euro 2008, he made one appearance, playing all 90 minutes in Poland's 2–2 away draw against Serbia on 21 November 2007. In September 2008, Fabiański replaced the suspended Boruc for the 2010 World Cup qualifiers against San Marino and Slovenia. He also played in another qualifying match against San Marino in April 2009. He was widely seen to be the starting goalkeeper for Poland in the UEFA Euro 2012, before an injury had him ruled out for the tournament held in his home country.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: Despite going into UEFA Euro 2016 as an understudy to Wojciech Szczęsny, an injury in the first game of the tournament led to Fabiański becoming first choice for the rest of the tournament. He went on to keep clean sheets in both of the remaining group games against World champions Germany and Ukraine. He then kept his place as Poland defeated Switzerland in the Round of 16 before losing to eventual winners Portugal on penalties.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: He was also included in the 2018 FIFA World Cup squad of Poland, however, he didn't appear in his two first games, as Poland suffered losses to Senegal and Colombia. He made his only World Cup debut in the final match against Japan, as Poland's 1–0 win proved to be little as Poland was eliminated from the group stage. He was also included into the squad of Poland for the UEFA Euro 2020, but played no game as Poland once again got eliminated with only a point.


title: Łukasz Fabiański

text: His international retirement was announced in August 2021. The following month, he accepted a call-up for his farewell match, a 2022 FIFA World Cup qualification fixture against San Marino on 9 October 2021. Fabiański started the game and was substituted in the 57th minute by Radosław Majecki, officially ending his international career with 57 caps.


title: Global surveillance disclosures (2013–present)

text: Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly emanate from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which he obtained whilst working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States. In addition to a trove of U.S. federal documents, Snowden's cache reportedly contains thousands of Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand intelligence files that he had accessed via the exclusive "Five Eyes" network. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by "The Washington Post" and "The Guardian", attracting considerable public attention. The disclosure continued throughout 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably "The New York Times" (United States), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, "Der Spiegel" (Germany), "O Globo" (Brazil), "Le Monde" (France), "L'espresso" (Italy), "NRC Handelsblad" (the Netherlands), "Dagbladet" (Norway), "El País" (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).


text: These media reports have shed light on the implications of several secret treaties signed by members of the UKUSA community in their efforts to implement global surveillance. For example, "Der Spiegel" revealed how the German Federal Intelligence Service (; BND) transfers "massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA", while Swedish Television revealed the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) provided the NSA with data from its cable collection, under a secret treaty signed in 1954 for bilateral cooperation on surveillance. Other security and intelligence agencies involved in the practice of global surveillance include those in Australia (ASD), Britain (GCHQ), Canada (CSE), Denmark (PET), France (DGSE), Germany (BND), Italy (AISE), the Netherlands (AIVD), Norway (NIS), Spain (CNI), Switzerland (NDB), Singapore (SID) as well as Israel (ISNU), which receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens that is shared by the NSA.


text: On June 14, 2013, United States prosecutors charged Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property. In late July 2013, he was granted a one-year temporary asylum by the Russian government, contributing to a deterioration of Russia–United States relations. Towards the end of October 2013, the British Prime Minister David Cameron warned "The Guardian" not to publish any more leaks, or it will receive a DA-Notice. In November 2013, a criminal investigation of the disclosure was being undertaken by Britain's Metropolitan Police Service. In December 2013, "The Guardian" editor Alan Rusbridger said: "We have published I think 26 documents so far out of the 58,000 we've seen."


text: The extent to which the media reports have responsibly informed the public is disputed. In January 2014, Obama said that "the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has often shed more heat than light" and critics such as Sean Wilentz have noted that many of the Snowden documents released do not concern domestic surveillance. The US & British Defense establishment weigh the strategic harm in the period following the disclosures more heavily than their civic public benefit. In its first assessment of these disclosures, the Pentagon concluded that Snowden committed the biggest "theft" of U.S. secrets in the history of the United States. Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, described Snowden's disclosure as the "most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever".


text: Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led "The Washington Post"s coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:


text: The disclosure revealed specific details of the NSA's close cooperation with U.S. federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in addition to the agency's previously undisclosed financial payments to numerous commercial partners and telecommunications companies, as well as its previously undisclosed relationships with international partners such as Britain, France, Germany, and its secret treaties with foreign governments that were recently established for sharing intercepted data of each other's citizens. The disclosures were made public over the course of several months since June 2013, by the press in several nations from the trove leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, who obtained the trove while working for Booz Allen Hamilton.


text: George Brandis, the Attorney-General of Australia, asserted that Snowden's disclosure is the "most serious setback for Western intelligence since the Second World War."


text: The NSA was also getting data directly from telecommunications companies code-named Artifice, Lithium, Serenade, SteelKnight, and X. The real identities of the companies behind these code names were not included in the Snowden document dump because they were protected as Exceptionally Controlled Information which prevents wide circulation even to those (like Snowden) who otherwise have the necessary security clearance.


text: Although the exact size of Snowden's disclosure remains unknown, the following estimates have been put up by various government officials:


text: As a contractor of the NSA, Snowden was granted access to U.S. government documents along with top secret documents of several allied governments, via the exclusive Five Eyes network. Snowden claims that he currently does not physically possess any of these documents, having surrendered all copies to journalists he met in Hong Kong.


text: According to his lawyer, Snowden has pledged not to release any documents while in Russia, leaving the responsibility for further disclosures solely to journalists. As of 2014, the following news outlets have accessed some of the documents provided by Snowden: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Channel 4, "Der Spiegel", "El Pais", "El Mundo", "L'espresso", "Le Monde", NBC, "NRC Handelsblad", "Dagbladet", "O Globo", "South China Morning Post", "Süddeutsche Zeitung", Sveriges Television, "The Guardian", "The New York Times", and "The Washington Post".


text: In the 1970s, NSA analyst Perry Fellwock (under the pseudonym "Winslow Peck") revealed the existence of the UKUSA Agreement, which forms the basis of the ECHELON network, whose existence was revealed in 1988 by Lockheed employee Margaret Newsham. Months before the September 11 attacks and during its aftermath, further details of the global surveillance apparatus were provided by various individuals such as the former MI5 official David Shayler and the journalist James Bamford, who were followed by:


text: In the aftermath of Snowden's revelations, The Pentagon concluded that Snowden committed the biggest theft of U.S. secrets in the history of the United States. In Australia, the coalition government described the leaks as the most damaging blow dealt to Australian intelligence in history. Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, described Snowden's disclosure as the "most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever".


text: In April 2012, NSA contractor Edward Snowden began downloading documents. That year, Snowden had made his first contact with journalist Glenn Greenwald, then employed by "The Guardian", and he contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in January 2013.


text: In May 2013, Snowden went on temporary leave from his position at the NSA, citing the pretext of receiving treatment for his epilepsy. Towards the end of May, he traveled to Hong Kong. Greenwald, Poitras and the Guardian's defence and intelligence correspondent Ewen MacAskill flew to Hong Kong to meet Snowden.


text: After the U.S.-based editor of "The Guardian", Janine Gibson, held several meetings in New York City, she decided that Greenwald, Poitras and the "Guardian"s defence and intelligence correspondent Ewen MacAskill would fly to Hong Kong to meet Snowden. On June 5, in the first media report based on the leaked material, "The Guardian" exposed a top secret court order showing that the NSA had collected phone records from over 120 million Verizon subscribers. Under the order, the numbers of both parties on a call, as well as the location data, unique identifiers, time of call, and duration of call were handed over to the FBI, which turned over the records to the NSA. According to "The Wall Street Journal", the Verizon order is part of a controversial data program, which seeks to stockpile records on all calls made in the U.S., but does not collect information directly from T-Mobile US and Verizon Wireless, in part because of their foreign ownership ties.


text: On June 6, 2013, the second media disclosure, the revelation of the PRISM surveillance program (which collects the e-mail, voice, text and video chats of foreigners and an unknown number of Americans from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and other tech giants), was published simultaneously by "The Guardian" and "The Washington Post".


text: "Der Spiegel" revealed NSA spying on multiple diplomatic missions of the European Union and the United Nations Headquarters in New York. During specific episodes within a four-year period, the NSA hacked several Chinese mobile-phone companies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Tsinghua University in Beijing, and the Asian fiber-optic network operator Pacnet. Only Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK are explicitly exempted from NSA attacks, whose main target in the European Union is Germany. A method of bugging encrypted fax machines used at an EU embassy is codenamed Dropmire.


text: During the 2009 G-20 London summit, the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intercepted the communications of foreign diplomats. In addition, GCHQ has been intercepting and storing mass quantities of fiber-optic traffic via Tempora. Two principal components of Tempora are called "Mastering the Internet" (MTI) and "Global Telecoms Exploitation". The data is preserved for three days while metadata is kept for thirty days. Data collected by GCHQ under Tempora is shared with the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States.


text: From 2001 to 2011, the NSA collected vast amounts of metadata records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans via Stellar Wind, which was later terminated due to operational and resource constraints. It was subsequently replaced by newer surveillance programs such as ShellTrumpet, which ""processed its one trillionth metadata record"" by the end of December 2012.


text: The NSA follows specific procedures to target non-U.S. persons and to minimize data collection from U.S. persons. These court-approved policies allow the NSA to:


text: According to Boundless Informant, over 97 billion pieces of intelligence were collected over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. Out of all 97 billion sets of information, about 3 billion data sets originated from U.S. computer networks and around 500 million metadata records were collected from German networks.


text: In August 2013, it was revealed that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) of Germany transfers massive amounts of metadata records to the NSA.


text: "Der Spiegel" disclosed that out of all 27 member states of the European Union, Germany is the most targeted due to the NSA's systematic monitoring and storage of Germany's telephone and Internet connection data. According to the magazine the NSA stores data from around half a billion communications connections in Germany each month. This data includes telephone calls, emails, mobile-phone text messages and chat transcripts.


text: The NSA gained massive amounts of information captured from the monitored data traffic in Europe. For example, in December 2012, the NSA gathered on an average day metadata from some 15 million telephone connections and 10 million Internet datasets. The NSA also monitored the European Commission in Brussels and monitored EU diplomatic Facilities in Washington and at the United Nations by placing bugs in offices as well as infiltrating computer networks.


text: The U.S. government made as part of its UPSTREAM data collection program deals with companies to ensure that it had access to and hence the capability to surveil undersea fiber-optic cables which deliver e-mails, Web pages, other electronic communications and phone calls from one continent to another at the speed of light.


text: According to the Brazilian newspaper "O Globo", the NSA spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilian citizens, while Australia and New Zealand have been involved in the joint operation of the NSA's global analytical system XKeyscore. Among the numerous allied facilities contributing to XKeyscore are four installations in Australia and one in New Zealand:


text: "O Globo" released an NSA document titled "", which revealed the specific locations and codenames of the FORNSAT intercept stations in 2002.


text: According to Edward Snowden, the NSA has established secret intelligence partnerships with many Western governments. The Foreign Affairs Directorate (FAD) of the NSA is responsible for these partnerships, which, according to Snowden, are organized such that foreign governments can "insulate their political leaders" from public outrage in the event that these global surveillance partnerships are leaked.


text: In an interview published by "Der Spiegel", Snowden accused the NSA of being "in bed together with the Germans". The NSA granted the German intelligence agencies BND (foreign intelligence) and BfV (domestic intelligence) access to its controversial XKeyscore system. In return, the BND turned over copies of two systems named Mira4 and Veras, reported to exceed the NSA's SIGINT capabilities in certain areas. Every day, massive amounts of metadata records are collected by the BND and transferred to the NSA via the Bad Aibling Station near Munich, Germany. In December 2012 alone, the BND handed over 500 million metadata records to the NSA.


text: In a document dated January 2013, the NSA acknowledged the efforts of the BND to undermine privacy laws:


text: According to an NSA document dated April 2013, Germany has now become the NSA's "most prolific partner". Under a section of a separate document leaked by Snowden titled "Success Stories", the NSA acknowledged the efforts of the German government to expand the BND's international data sharing with partners:


text: In addition, the German government was well aware of the PRISM surveillance program long before Edward Snowden made details public. According to Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert, there are two separate PRISM programs – one is used by the NSA and the other is used by NATO forces in Afghanistan. The two programs are "not identical".


text: "The Guardian" revealed further details of the NSA's XKeyscore tool, which allows government analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals without prior authorization. Microsoft "developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the interception of encrypted chats on Outlook.com, within five months after the service went into testing. NSA had access to Outlook.com emails because "Prism collects this data prior to encryption."


text: In addition, Microsoft worked with the FBI to enable the NSA to gain access to its cloud storage service SkyDrive. An internal NSA document dating from August 3, 2012, described the PRISM surveillance program as a "team sport".


text: The CIA's National Counterterrorism Center is allowed to examine federal government files for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect U.S. citizens of wrongdoing. Previously the NTC was barred to do so, unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.


text: Snowden also confirmed that Stuxnet was cooperatively developed by the United States and Israel. In a report unrelated to Edward Snowden, the French newspaper "Le Monde" revealed that France's DGSE was also undertaking mass surveillance, which it described as "illegal and outside any serious control".


text: Documents leaked by Edward Snowden that were seen by "Süddeutsche Zeitung" (SZ) and "Norddeutscher Rundfunk" revealed that several telecom operators have played a key role in helping the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) tap into worldwide fiber-optic communications. The telecom operators are:


text: Each of them were assigned a particular area of the international fiber-optic network for which they were individually responsible. The following networks have been infiltrated by GCHQ: TAT-14 (EU-UK-US), Atlantic Crossing 1 (EU-UK-US), Circe South (France-UK), Circe North (Netherlands-UK), Flag Atlantic-1, Flag Europa-Asia, SEA-ME-WE 3 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe), SEA-ME-WE 4 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe), Solas (Ireland-UK), UK-France 3, UK-Netherlands 14, ULYSSES (EU-UK), Yellow (UK-US) and Pan European Crossing (EU-UK).


text: Telecommunication companies who participated were "forced" to do so and had "no choice in the matter". Some of the companies were subsequently paid by GCHQ for their participation in the infiltration of the cables. According to the SZ, GCHQ has access to the majority of internet and telephone communications flowing throughout Europe, can listen to phone calls, read emails and text messages, see which websites internet users from all around the world are visiting. It can also retain and analyse nearly the entire European internet traffic.


text: GCHQ is collecting all data transmitted to and from the United Kingdom and Northern Europe via the undersea fibre optic telecommunications cable SEA-ME-WE 3. The Security and Intelligence Division (SID) of Singapore co-operates with Australia in accessing and sharing communications carried by the SEA-ME-WE-3 cable. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is also in a partnership with British, American and Singaporean intelligence agencies to tap undersea fibre optic telecommunications cables that link Asia, the Middle East and Europe and carry much of Australia's international phone and internet traffic.


text: The U.S. runs a top-secret surveillance program known as the Special Collection Service (SCS), which is based in over 80 U.S. consulates and embassies worldwide. The NSA hacked the United Nations' video conferencing system in Summer 2012 in violation of a UN agreement.


text: The NSA is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, but also searching the contents of vast amounts of e-mail and text communications into and out of the country by Americans who mention information about foreigners under surveillance. It also spied on Al Jazeera and gained access to its internal communications systems.


text: The NSA has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic. U.S. Law-enforcement agencies use tools used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects. An internal NSA audit from May 2012 identified 2776 incidents i.e. violations of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans and foreign targets in the U.S. in the period from April 2011 through March 2012, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes are not intentional.


text: The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do so and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. A legal opinion declassified on August 21, 2013, revealed that the NSA intercepted for three years as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans not suspected of having links to terrorism, before FISA court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011. Under the Corporate Partner Access project, major U.S. telecommunications providers receive hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the NSA. Voluntary cooperation between the NSA and the providers of global communications took off during the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY.


text: A letter drafted by the Obama administration specifically to inform Congress of the government's mass collection of Americans' telephone communications data was withheld from lawmakers by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee in the months before a key vote affecting the future of the program.


text: The NSA paid GCHQ over £100 Million between 2009 and 2012, in exchange for these funds GCHQ "must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight." Documents referenced in the article explain that the weaker British laws regarding spying are "a selling point" for the NSA. GCHQ is also developing the technology to "exploit any mobile phone at any time." The NSA has under a legal authority a secret backdoor into its databases gathered from large Internet companies enabling it to search for U.S. citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant.


text: The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board urged the U.S. intelligence chiefs to draft stronger US surveillance guidelines on domestic spying after finding that several of those guidelines have not been updated up to 30 years. U.S. intelligence analysts have deliberately broken rules designed to prevent them from spying on Americans by choosing to ignore so-called "minimisation procedures" aimed at protecting privacy and used the NSA's agency's enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests.


text: After the U.S. Foreign Secret Intelligence Court ruled in October 2011 that some of the NSA's activities were unconstitutional, the agency paid millions of dollars to major internet companies to cover extra costs incurred in their involvement with the PRISM surveillance program.


text: "Mastering the Internet" (MTI) is part of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) of the British government that involves the insertion of thousands of DPI (deep packet inspection) "black boxes" at various internet service providers, as revealed by the British media in 2009.


text: In 2013, it was further revealed that the NSA had made a £17.2  million financial contribution to the project, which is capable of vacuuming signals from up to 200 fibre-optic cables at all physical points of entry into Great Britain.


text: The "Guardian" and "The New York Times" reported on secret documents leaked by Snowden showing that the NSA has been in "collaboration with technology companies" as part of "an aggressive, multipronged effort" to weaken the encryption used in commercial software, and GCHQ has a team dedicated to cracking "Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook" traffic.


text: Germany's domestic security agency Bundesverfassungsschutz (BfV) systematically transfers the personal data of German residents to the NSA, CIA and seven other members of the United States Intelligence Community, in exchange for information and espionage software. Israel, Sweden and Italy are also cooperating with American and British intelligence agencies. Under a secret treaty codenamed "Lustre", French intelligence agencies transferred millions of metadata records to the NSA.


text: The Obama Administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans' communications in its massive databases. The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner "reasonably believed" to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year. But a warrant for each target would thus no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies or "foreign powers." The FISC extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years with an extension possible for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. Both measures were done without public debate or any specific authority from Congress.


text: A special branch of the NSA called "Follow the Money" (FTM) monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions and later stores the collected data in the NSA's own financial databank "Tracfin". The NSA monitored the communications of Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff and her top aides. The agency also spied on Brazil's oil firm Petrobras as well as French diplomats, and gained access to the private network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France and the SWIFT network.


text: In the United States, the NSA uses the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs of American citizens to create sophisticated graphs of their social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information. The NSA routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about U.S. citizens.


text: In an effort codenamed GENIE, computer specialists can control foreign computer networks using "covert implants," a form of remotely transmitted malware on tens of thousands of devices annually. As worldwide sales of smartphones began exceeding those of feature phones, the NSA decided to take advantage of the smartphone boom. This is particularly advantageous because the smartphone combines a myriad of data that would interest an intelligence agency, such as social contacts, user behavior, interests, location, photos and credit card numbers and passwords.


text: An internal NSA report from 2010 stated that the spread of the smartphone has been occurring "extremely rapidly"—developments that "certainly complicate traditional target analysis." According to the document, the NSA has set up task forces assigned to several smartphone manufacturers and operating systems, including Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iOS operating system, as well as Google's Android mobile operating system. Similarly, Britain's GCHQ assigned a team to study and crack the BlackBerry.


text: Under the heading "iPhone capability", the document notes that there are smaller NSA programs, known as "scripts", that can perform surveillance on 38 different features of the iOS 3 and iOS 4 operating systems. These include the mapping feature, voicemail and photos, as well as Google Earth, Facebook and Yahoo! Messenger.


text: On September 9, 2013, an internal NSA presentation on iPhone Location Services was published by "Der Spiegel". One slide shows scenes from Apple's "1984"-themed television commercial alongside the words "Who knew in 1984..."; another shows Steve Jobs holding an iPhone, with the text "...that this would be big brother..."; and a third shows happy consumers with their iPhones, completing the question with "...and the zombies would be paying customers?"


text: On October 4, 2013, "The Washington Post" and "The Guardian" jointly reported that the NSA and GCHQ had made repeated attempts to spy on anonymous Internet users who have been communicating in secret via the anonymity network Tor. Several of these surveillance operations involved the implantation of malicious code into the computers of Tor users who visit particular websites. The NSA and GCHQ had partly succeeded in blocking access to the anonymous network, diverting Tor users to insecure channels. The government agencies were also able to uncover the identity of some anonymous Internet users.


text: The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) has been using a program called Olympia to map the communications of Brazil's Mines and Energy Ministry by targeting the metadata of phone calls and emails to and from the ministry.


text: The Australian Federal Government knew about the PRISM surveillance program months before Edward Snowden made details public.


text: The NSA gathered hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world. The agency did not target individuals. Instead it collected contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world's e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.


text: The NSA monitored the public email account of former Mexican president Felipe Calderón (thus gaining access to the communications of high-ranking cabinet members), the emails of several high-ranking members of Mexico's security forces and text and the mobile phone communication of current Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. The NSA tries to gather cellular and landline phone numbers—often obtained from American diplomats—for as many foreign officials as possible. The contents of the phone calls are stored in computer databases that can regularly be searched using keywords.


text: The NSA has been monitoring telephone conversations of 35 world leaders. The U.S. government's first public acknowledgment that it tapped the phones of world leaders was reported on October 28, 2013, by the Wall Street Journal after an internal U.S. government review turned up NSA monitoring of some 35 world leaders. GCHQ has tried to keep its mass surveillance program a secret because it feared a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities which could lead to legal challenges against them.


text: "The Guardian" revealed that the NSA had been monitoring telephone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another U.S. government department. A confidential memo revealed that the NSA encouraged senior officials in such Departments as the White House, State and The Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency could add the telephone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems. Reacting to the news, German leader Angela Merkel, arriving in Brussels for an EU summit, accused the U.S. of a breach of trust, saying: "We need to have trust in our allies and partners, and this must now be established once again. I repeat that spying among friends is not at all acceptable against anyone, and that goes for every citizen in Germany." The NSA collected in 2010 data on ordinary Americans' cellphone locations, but later discontinued it because it had no "operational value."


text: Under Britain's MUSCULAR programme, the NSA and GCHQ have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world and thereby gained the ability to collect metadata and content at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts.


text: The mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel might have been tapped by U.S. intelligence. According to the Spiegel this monitoring goes back to 2002 and ended in the summer of 2013, while "The New York Times" reported that Germany has evidence that the NSA's surveillance of Merkel began during George W. Bush's tenure. After learning from "Der Spiegel" magazine that the NSA has been listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel compared the snooping practices of the NSA with those of the Stasi. It was reported in March 2014, by Der Spiegel that Merkel had also been placed on an NSA surveillance list alongside 122 other world leaders.


text: On October 31, 2013, Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of the German Bundestag, met Snowden in Moscow and revealed the former intelligence contractor's readiness to brief the German government on NSA spying.


text: A highly sensitive signals intelligence collection program known as Stateroom involves the interception of radio, telecommunications and internet traffic. It is operated out of the diplomatic missions of the Five Eyes (Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, United States) in numerous locations around the world. The program conducted at U.S. diplomatic missions is run in concert by the U.S. intelligence agencies NSA and CIA in a joint venture group called "Special Collection Service" (SCS), whose members work undercover in shielded areas of the American Embassies and Consulates, where they are officially accredited as diplomats and as such enjoy special privileges. Under diplomatic protection, they are able to look and listen unhindered. The SCS for example used the American Embassy near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to monitor communications in Germany's government district with its parliament and the seat of the government.


text: Under the Stateroom surveillance programme, Australia operates clandestine surveillance facilities to intercept phone calls and data across much of Asia.


text: In France, the NSA targeted people belonging to the worlds of business, politics or French state administration. The NSA monitored and recorded the content of telephone communications and the history of the connections of each target i.e. the metadata. The actual surveillance operation was performed by French intelligence agencies on behalf of the NSA. The cooperation between France and the NSA was confirmed by the Director of the NSA, Keith B. Alexander, who asserted that foreign intelligence services collected phone records in "war zones" and "other areas outside their borders" and provided them to the NSA.


text: The French newspaper "Le Monde" also disclosed new PRISM and Upstream slides (See Page 4, 7 and 8) coming from the "PRISM/US-984XN Overview" presentation.


text: In Spain, the NSA intercepted the telephone conversations, text messages and emails of millions of Spaniards, and spied on members of the Spanish government. Between December 10, 2012, and January 8, 2013, the NSA collected metadata on 60 million telephone calls in Spain.


text: According to documents leaked by Snowden, the surveillance of Spanish citizens was jointly conducted by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of Spain.


text: "The New York Times" reported that the NSA carries out an eavesdropping effort, dubbed Operation Dreadnought, against the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. During his 2009 visit to Iranian Kurdistan, the agency collaborated with GCHQ and the U.S.'s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, collecting radio transmissions between aircraft and airports, examining Khamenei's convoy with satellite imagery, and enumerating military radar stations. According to the story, an objective of the operation is "communications fingerprinting": the ability to distinguish Khamenei's communications from those of other people in Iran.


text: The same story revealed an operation code-named Ironavenger, in which the NSA intercepted e-mails sent between a country allied with the United States and the government of "an adversary". The ally was conducting a spear-phishing attack: its e-mails contained malware. The NSA gathered documents and login credentials belonging to the enemy country, along with knowledge of the ally's capabilities for attacking computers.


text: According to the British newspaper "The Independent", the British intelligence agency GCHQ maintains a listening post on the roof of the British Embassy in Berlin that is capable of intercepting mobile phone calls, wi-fi data and long-distance communications all over the German capital, including adjacent government buildings such as the Reichstag (seat of the German parliament) and the Chancellery (seat of Germany's head of government) clustered around the Brandenburg Gate.


text: Operating under the code-name "Quantum Insert", GCHQ set up a fake website masquerading as LinkedIn, a social website used for professional networking, as part of its efforts to install surveillance software on the computers of the telecommunications operator Belgacom. In addition, the headquarters of the oil cartel OPEC were infiltrated by GCHQ as well as the NSA, which bugged the computers of nine OPEC employees and monitored the General Secretary of OPEC.


text: For more than three years GCHQ has been using an automated monitoring system code-named "Royal Concierge" to infiltrate the reservation systems of at least 350 prestigious hotels in many different parts of the world in order to target, search and analyze reservations to detect diplomats and government officials. First tested in 2010, the aim of the "Royal Concierge" is to track down the travel plans of diplomats, and it is often supplemented with surveillance methods related to human intelligence (HUMINT). Other covert operations include the wiretapping of room telephones and fax machines used in targeted hotels as well as the monitoring of computers hooked up to the hotel network.


text: In November 2013, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and "The Guardian" revealed that the Australian Signals Directorate (DSD) had attempted to listen to the private phone calls of the president of Indonesia and his wife. The Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, confirmed that he and the president had contacted the ambassador in Canberra. Natalegawa said any tapping of Indonesian politicians' personal phones "violates every single decent and legal instrument I can think of—national in Indonesia, national in Australia, international as well".


text: Carrying the title "3G impact and update", a classified presentation leaked by Snowden revealed the attempts of the ASD/DSD to keep up to pace with the rollout of 3G technology in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia. The ASD/DSD motto placed at the bottom of each page reads: "Reveal their secrets—protect our own."


text: Under a secret deal approved by British intelligence officials, the NSA has been storing and analyzing the internet and email records of British citizens since 2007. The NSA also proposed in 2005 a procedure for spying on the citizens of the UK and other Five-Eyes nations alliance, even where the partner government has explicitly denied the U.S. permission to do so. Under the proposal, partner countries must neither be informed about this particular type of surveillance, nor the procedure of doing so.


text: Towards the end of November, "The New York Times" released an internal NSA report outlining the agency's efforts to expand its surveillance abilities. The five-page document asserts that the law of the United States has not kept up with the needs of the NSA to conduct mass surveillance in the "golden age" of signals intelligence, but there are grounds for optimism because, in the NSA's own words:


text: The report, titled "SIGINT Strategy 2012–2016", also said that the U.S. will try to influence the "global commercial encryption market" through "commercial relationships", and emphasized the need to "revolutionize" the analysis of its vast data collection to "radically increase operational impact".


text: On November 23, 2013, the Dutch newspaper "NRC Handelsblad" reported that the Netherlands was targeted by U.S. intelligence agencies in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This period of surveillance lasted from 1946 to 1968, and also included the interception of the communications of other European countries including Belgium, France, West Germany and Norway. The Dutch Newspaper also reported that NSA infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide, often covertly, with malicious spy software, sometimes in cooperation with local authorities, designed to steal sensitive information.


text: According to the classified documents leaked by Snowden, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), formerly known as the Defense Signals Directorate, had offered to share intelligence information it had collected with the other intelligence agencies of the UKUSA Agreement. Data shared with foreign countries include "bulk, unselected, unminimized metadata" it had collected. The ASD provided such information on the condition that no Australian citizens were targeted. At the time the ASD assessed that "unintentional collection [of metadata of Australian nationals] is not viewed as a significant issue". If a target was later identified as being an Australian national, the ASD was required to be contacted to ensure that a warrant could be sought. Consideration was given as to whether "medical, legal or religious information" would be automatically treated differently to other types of data, however a decision was made that each agency would make such determinations on a case-by-case basis. Leaked material does not specify where the ASD had collected the intelligence information from, however Section 7(a) of the Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Commonwealth) states that the ASD's role is "...to obtain intelligence about the capabilities, intentions or activities of people or organizations outside Australia...". As such, it is possible ASD's metadata intelligence holdings was focused on foreign intelligence collection and was within the bounds of Australian law.


text: "The Washington Post" revealed that the NSA has been tracking the locations of mobile phones from all over the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. In the process of doing so, the NSA collects more than five billion records of phone locations on a daily basis. This enables NSA analysts to map cellphone owners' relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths.


text: The Washington Post also reported that both GCHQ and the NSA make use of location data and advertising tracking files generated through normal internet browsing (with cookies operated by Google, known as "Pref") to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.


text: The Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS), which cooperates with the NSA, has gained access to Russian targets in the Kola Peninsula and other civilian targets. In general, the NIS provides information to the NSA about "Politicians", "Energy" and "Armament". A top secret memo of the NSA lists the following years as milestones of the Norway–United States of America SIGINT agreement, or NORUS Agreement:


text: The NSA considers the NIS to be one of its most reliable partners. Both agencies also cooperate to crack the encryption systems of mutual targets. According to the NSA, Norway has made no objections to its requests from the NIS.


text: On December 5, Sveriges Television reported the National Defense Radio Establishment (FRA) has been conducting a clandestine surveillance operation in Sweden, targeting the internal politics of Russia. The operation was conducted on behalf of the NSA, receiving data handed over to it by the FRA. The Swedish-American surveillance operation also targeted Russian energy interests as well as the Baltic states. As part of the UKUSA Agreement, a secret treaty was signed in 1954 by Sweden with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, regarding collaboration and intelligence sharing.


text: As a result of Snowden's disclosures, the notion of Swedish neutrality in international politics was called into question. In an internal document dating from the year 2006, the NSA acknowledged that its "relationship" with Sweden is "protected at the TOP SECRET level because of that nation's political neutrality." Specific details of Sweden's cooperation with members of the UKUSA Agreement include:


text: According to documents leaked by Snowden, the Special Source Operations of the NSA has been sharing information containing "logins, cookies, and GooglePREFID" with the Tailored Access Operations division of the NSA, as well as Britain's GCHQ agency.


text: During the 2010 G-20 Toronto summit, the U.S. embassy in Ottawa was transformed into a security command post during a six-day spying operation that was conducted by the NSA and closely coordinated with the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). The goal of the spying operation was, among others, to obtain information on international development, banking reform, and to counter trade protectionism to support "U.S. policy goals." On behalf of the NSA, the CSEC has set up covert spying posts in 20 countries around the world.


text: In Italy the Special Collection Service of the NSA maintains two separate surveillance posts in Rome and Milan. According to a secret NSA memo dated September 2010, the Italian embassy in Washington, D.C. has been targeted by two spy operations of the NSA:


text: Due to concerns that terrorist or criminal networks may be secretly communicating via computer games, the NSA, GCHQ, CIA, and FBI have been conducting surveillance and scooping up data from the networks of many online games, including massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, as well as virtual worlds such as Second Life, and the Xbox gaming console.


text: The NSA has cracked the most commonly used cellphone encryption technology, A5/1. According to a classified document leaked by Snowden, the agency can "process encrypted A5/1" even when it has not acquired an encryption key. In addition, the NSA uses various types of cellphone infrastructure, such as the links between carrier networks, to determine the location of a cellphone user tracked by Visitor Location Registers.


text: US district court judge for the District of Columbia, Richard Leon, declared on December 16, 2013, that the mass collection of metadata of Americans' telephone records by the National Security Agency probably violates the fourth amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Leon granted the request for a preliminary injunction that blocks the collection of phone data for two private plaintiffs (Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer, and Charles Strange, father of a cryptologist killed in Afghanistan when his helicopter was shot down in 2011) and ordered the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered. But the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his 68-page opinion the "significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues."


text: However federal judge William H. Pauley III in New York City ruled the U.S. government's global telephone data-gathering system is needed to thwart potential terrorist attacks, and that it can only work if everyone's calls are swept in. U.S. District Judge Pauley also ruled that Congress legally set up the program and that it does not violate anyone's constitutional rights. The judge also concluded that the telephone data being swept up by NSA did not belong to telephone users, but to the telephone companies. He further ruled that when NSA obtains such data from the telephone companies, and then probes into it to find links between callers and potential terrorists, this further use of the data was not even a search under the Fourth Amendment. He also concluded that the controlling precedent is "Smith v. Maryland": "Smith's bedrock holding is that an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information provided to third parties," Judge Pauley wrote. The American Civil Liberties Union declared on January 2, 2012, that it will appeal Judge Pauley's ruling that NSA bulk the phone record collection is legal. "The government has a legitimate interest in tracking the associations of suspected terrorists, but tracking those associations does not require the government to subject every citizen to permanent surveillance," deputy ACLU legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement.


text: In recent years, American and British intelligence agencies conducted surveillance on more than 1,100 targets, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.


text: A catalog of high-tech gadgets and software developed by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) was leaked by the German news magazine "Der Spiegel". Dating from 2008, the catalog revealed the existence of special gadgets modified to capture computer screenshots and USB flash drives secretly fitted with radio transmitters to broadcast stolen data over the airwaves, and fake base stations intended to intercept mobile phone signals, as well as many other secret devices and software implants listed here:


text: The Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division of the NSA intercepted the shipping deliveries of computers and laptops in order to install spyware and physical implants on electronic gadgets. This was done in close cooperation with the FBI and the CIA. NSA officials responded to the Spiegel reports with a statement, which said: "Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the front lines of enabling NSA to defend the nation and its allies. [TAO's] work is centred on computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence collection."


text: In a separate disclosure unrelated to Snowden, the French Trésor public, which runs a certificate authority, was found to have issued fake certificates impersonating Google in order to facilitate spying on French government employees via man-in-the-middle attacks.


text: The NSA is working to build a powerful quantum computer capable of breaking all types of encryption. The effort is part of a US$79.7 million research program known as "Penetrating Hard Targets". It involves extensive research carried out in large, shielded rooms known as Faraday cages, which are designed to prevent electromagnetic radiation from entering or leaving. Currently, the NSA is close to producing basic building blocks that will allow the agency to gain "complete quantum control on two semiconductor qubits". Once a quantum computer is successfully built, it would enable the NSA to unlock the encryption that protects data held by banks, credit card companies, retailers, brokerages, governments and health care providers.


text: According to "The New York Times", the NSA is monitoring approximately 100,000 computers worldwide with spy software named Quantum. Quantum enables the NSA to conduct surveillance on those computers on the one hand, and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks on the other hand. Among the targets are the Chinese and Russian military, but also trade institutions within the European Union. The NYT also reported that the NSA can access and alter computers which are not connected with the internet by a secret technology in use by the NSA since 2008. The prerequisite is the physical insertion of the radio frequency hardware by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user. The technology relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target. The technology can also transmit malware back to the infected computer.


text: Channel 4 and "The Guardian" revealed the existence of Dishfire, a massive database of the NSA that collects hundreds of millions of text messages on a daily basis. GCHQ has been given full access to the database, which it uses to obtain personal information of Britons by exploiting a legal loophole.


text: The database is supplemented with an analytical tool known as the Prefer program, which processes SMS messages to extract other types of information including contacts from missed call alerts.


text: The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on mass surveillance was released on January 23, 2014. It recommends to end the bulk telephone metadata, i.e., bulk phone records – phone numbers dialed, call times and durations, but not call content collection – collection program, to create a "Special Advocate" to be involved in some cases before the FISA court judge and to release future and past FISC decisions "that involve novel interpretations of FISA or other significant questions of law, technology or compliance."


text: According to a joint disclosure by "The New York Times", "The Guardian", and ProPublica, the NSA and GCHQ have begun working together to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone application software by 2007 at the latest. A 2008 GCHQ report, leaked by Snowden asserts that "anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system". The NSA and GCHQ have traded recipes for various purposes such as grabbing location data and journey plans that are made when a target uses Google Maps, and vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, phone logs and geographic data embedded in photos posted on the mobile versions of numerous social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services. In a separate 20-page report dated 2012, GCHQ cited the popular smartphone game "Angry Birds" as an example of how an application could be used to extract user data. Taken together, such forms of data collection would allow the agencies to collect vital information about a user's life, including his or her home country, current location (through geolocation), age, gender, ZIP code, marital status, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, number of children, etc.


text: A GCHQ document dated August 2012 provided details of the Squeaky Dolphin surveillance program, which enables GCHQ to conduct broad, real-time monitoring of various social media features and social media traffic such as YouTube video views, the Like button on Facebook, and Blogspot/Blogger visits without the knowledge or consent of the companies providing those social media features. The agency's "Squeaky Dolphin" program can collect, analyze and utilize YouTube, Facebook and Blogger data in specific situations in real time for analysis purposes. The program also collects the addresses from the billions of videos watched daily as well as some user information for analysis purposes.


text: During the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the NSA and its Five Eyes partners monitored the communications of delegates of numerous countries. This was done to give their own policymakers a negotiating advantage.


text: The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) has been tracking Canadian air passengers via free Wi-Fi services at a major Canadian airport. Passengers who exited the airport terminal continued to be tracked as they showed up at other Wi-Fi locations across Canada. In a CSEC document dated May 2012, the agency described how it had gained access to two communications systems with over 300,000 users in order to pinpoint a specific imaginary target. The operation was executed on behalf of the NSA as a trial run to test a new technology capable of tracking down "any target that makes occasional forays into other cities/regions." This technology was subsequently shared with Canada's Five Eyes partners – Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States.


text: According to research by "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and TV network NDR the mobile phone of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder was monitored from 2002 onwards, reportedly because of his government's opposition to military intervention in Iraq. The source of the latest information is a document leaked by Edward Snowden. The document, containing information about the National Sigint Requirement List (NSRL), had previously been interpreted as referring only to Angela Merkel's mobile. However "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and NDR claim to have confirmation from NSA insiders that the surveillance authorisation pertains not to the individual, but the political post – which in 2002 was still held by Schröder. According to research by the two media outlets, Schröder was placed as number 388 on the list, which contains the names of persons and institutions to be put under surveillance by the NSA.


text: GCHQ launched a cyber-attack on the activist network "Anonymous", using denial-of-service attack (DoS) to shut down a chatroom frequented by the network's members and to spy on them. The attack, dubbed Rolling Thunder, was conducted by a GCHQ unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). The unit successfully uncovered the true identities of several Anonymous members.