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In his new book No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald revealed a number of additional details onthe craft and tools used by the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ. While many of the capabilities and activities Greenwald details in the book were previously published in reports drawing from Edward Snowdens vast haul of NSA documents, a number of new pieces of information have come to lightincluding the NSAs and GCHQs efforts to use airlines in-flight data service to track and surveil targeted passengers in real time.

The systemscodenamed Homing Pigeon by the NSA and Thieving Magpie by the GCHQallowed the agencies to track which aircraft individuals under surveillance boarded based on their phone data.

We can confirm that targets are on board specific flights in near real time, enabling surveillance or arrest teams to be put in place in advance, a GCHQ analyst wrote in a PowerPoint slide presentation on the program. If they use data, we can also recover email addresss [sic], Facebook IDs, Skype addresses, etc.

The technology allows the NSA and GCHQ to get a geographic fix on surveilled aircraft once every two minutes in transit.

Latest batch of documents leaked shows NSA's power to pwn.

Greenwald asserts in his book that at the same time the US intelligence community and legislators were warning that Chinese networking vendors Huawei and ZTE were untrustworthy because of connections to Chinas Peoples Liberation Army, the NSA was routinely intercept[ing] routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.

Greenwald cited a June 2010 report from the head of the NSAs Access and Target Development department in which the official wrote, In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and the network.

Read more from the original source:

NSA routinely tapped in-flight Internet, intercepted exported routers