Documents obtained by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA has covertly intercepted and recorded nearly all of the calls made to, from, or between cell phones in The Bahamas. The surveillance, reported by The Intercept, used legal monitoring access obtained by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
via NSA loves The Bahamas so much it records all its cellphone calls | Ars Technica.
A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide details how the agency’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers, and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they’re delivered.
These Trojan horse systems were described by an NSA manager as being “some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.”
The document, a June 2010 internal newsletter article by the chief of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department (S3261) includes photos (above) of NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed specifically for the task.
via Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant | Ars Technica.
Sean M. Gallagher 