Snowden disclosures

During the 2010s, international media reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets throughout the year. These media reports disclosed 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 (German: Bundesnachrichtendienst; 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 agreement 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), Japan (DIH), 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 from the NSA. 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. Toward the end of October 2013, British prime minister David Cameron threatened to issue a D-Notice after The Guardian published "damaging" intelligence leaks from Snowden. In November 2013, a criminal investigation of the disclosure was 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." The extent to which the media reports responsibly informed the public is disputed. In January 2014, Barack Obama, then the president of the United States, claimed 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 do not concern domestic surveillance. 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".

Background Snowden obtained the documents while working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States. The initial simultaneous publication in June 2013 by The Washington Post and The Guardian continued throughout 2013. 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). Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:

Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet, and location records of whole populations. 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. George Brandis, the Attorney-General of Australia, claimed that Snowden's disclosure is the "most serious setback for Western intelligence since the Second World War."

Global surveillance

As of December 2013, global surveillance programs include:

The NSA was also getting data directly from telecommunications companies code-named Artifice (Verizon), Lithium (AT&T), 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.

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

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