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NSA surveillance program can retrieve, replay phone calls

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Anti-spying protesters outside the US Department of Justice in Washington, DC, earlier this year. Photo: Reuters

The US National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording ''100 per cent'' of a foreign country's telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

The National Security Agency building in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: AP

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for ''retrospective retrieval'', and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

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In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording ''every single'' conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door ''into the past'', the summary says, enabling users to ''retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call''. Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 per cent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or ''cuts'', for processing and long-term storage.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Photo: Getty Images

At the request of US officials, this article withholdsdetails that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

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NSA surveillance program can retrieve, replay phone calls

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Leaked NSA Documents Reveal How To Hide From The NSA

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PC Format Magazine via Getty Images New information reported by Der Spiegel suggests staying anonymous online is a more accessible prospect than it seems. (Photo by Simon Lees/PC Format Magazine via Getty Images)

If you want a truly anonymous life, then maybe it's time you learned about Tor, CSpace and ZRTP.

These three technologies could help people hide their activities from the National Security Agency, according to NSA documents newly obtained from the archive of former contractor Edward Snowden by the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The combination of Tor, CSpace and ZRTP (plus another anonymizing technology for good measure) results in levels of protection that the NSA deems "catastrophic" -- meaning the organization has "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications," according to Der Spiegel.

"Although the documents are around two years old, experts consider it unlikely the agency's digital spies have made much progress in cracking these technologies," Spiegel's staff wrote.

In comparison, accessing somebody's Facebook messages is considered a "minor" task for the agency. Similarly, virtual private networks (or VPNs), which are widely used by companies, are easily accessed by the NSA, according to Der Spiegel's report, as are so-called "HTTPS" connections.

So, what are these services and what do you actually have to do to use them?

Tor is basically a network that offers an easy way for people to mask their location when communicating online. Anyone can download Tor's web browser -- it's available on Mac, Windows, Linux, and smartphones. It's not foolproof: When using Tor, you're advised to sacrifice the convenience of browser plugins, torrent downloads, and websites that don't use "HTTPS encryption" if you truly want to stay off the grid.

And that's just if you want to mask your online habits -- messaging and phone calls require more steps still, meaning you also have to add CSpace and ZRTP if you want to hide those from the NSA, according to Der Spiegel.

CSpace is a program that lets people text chat and transfer files, while ZRTP is a form of encryption that protects mobile phone calls and texting -- it's used in apps like RedPhone and Signal.

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Leaked NSA Documents Reveal How To Hide From The NSA

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New documents show NSA staff spied on spouses for over a decade – Video

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New documents show NSA staff spied on spouses for over a decade
The heavily-redacted previously top secret documents were quietly released on Christmas Eve. The report details various means through which NSA staff mishandled the data and violated US law....

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New documents show NSA staff spied on spouses for over a decade - Video

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Newly published NSA documents show agency could grab all Skype traffic

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NSA's PRISM access to Skype keys and PSTN gateways let them reach out and touch calls worldwide.

A National Security Agency document published this week by the German news magazine Der Spiegel from the trove provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shows that the agency had full access to voice, video, text messaging, and file sharing fromtargeted individuals over Microsofts Skype service. The access, mandated by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant, was part of the NSAs PRISM program and allowed sustained Skype collection in real time from specific users identified by their Skype user names.

The nature of the Skype data collection was spelled out in an NSA document dated August 2012 entitled Users Guide for PRISM Skype Collection. The document details how to task the capture of voice communications from Skype by NSAs NUCLEON system, which allows for text searches against captured voice communications. It also discusses how to find text chat and other data sent between clients in NSAs PINWALE digital network intelligence database.

The full capture of voice traffic began in February of 2011 for Skype in and Skype out callscalls between a Skype user and a land line or cellphone through a gateway to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), captured through warranted taps into Microsofts gateways. But in July of 2011, the NSA added the capability of capturing peer-to-peer Skype communicationsmeaning that the NSA gained the ability to capture peer-to-peer traffic and decrypt it using keys provided by Microsoft through the PRISM warrant request.

The NSA was then able to task any Skype traffic that passed over networks it monitored or by exploitation of a targeted users system. NSA receives Skype collection via prism when one of the peers is a (FISA Amendments Act Section 702) tasked target, the Skype collection guide stated. Because Skype has no central servers, the guide explained, for multiparty calls, Skype creates a mesh-network, where users are connected together through multiple peer-to-peer links. Instant Messages sent to this group of meshed participants can be routed through any participant. If any participant in a chat was monitored, the NSA could capture all of the IM traffic in the shared chat.

Initially, NSA analysts had to piece together voice communications between peers because they were carried over separate streams, but a service added by August of 2012 by the NSAs Cryptanalysis and Exploitation Services (CES) automatically stitched both audio streams of a conversation together. As of 2012, however, analysts still had to search for associated video from a call session to match it up with audio in a tool called the Digital Network Intelligence Presenter (DNIP).

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Newly published NSA documents show agency could grab all Skype traffic

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Long war tactics … or how we learned to stop worrying and love the NSA [31c3] – Video

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Long war tactics ... or how we learned to stop worrying and love the NSA [31c3]
Long war tactics or how we learned to stop worrying and love the NSA Referring to the seminal talk Dymaxion gave at the closing of the NoisySquare at OHM in 2013. This talk will explore what...

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Long war tactics ... or how we learned to stop worrying and love the NSA [31c3] - Video

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NSA Docs Reveal Spy-Proof Encryption Tools

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New material leaked by Edward Snowden shows which Internet security protocols the NSA had beaten as of 2012 and which encryption tools were still stymying cyber spies.

Digital spies in the National Security Administration cracked Skype's encryption back in 2011 and can make quick work of the VPNs many businesses believe make their communications secure.

But more robust security protocols and encryption techniques may still be secure from prying NSA eyes, according to documents revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Der Spiegel has the rundown on the NSA's battle against what its training documents described as the "threat" of secure Internet communication. Snowden's documentation is several years old now, of course. Whether or not U.S. cyber spies have managed to crack some of the toughest nuts in the intervening years, like Tor network communications, isn't known.

First, the security layers that the NSA considered to be "trivial," "minor," or "moderate" challenges to get through as of 2012. These include such tasks as simply monitoring a document as it travels across the Internet, spying on Facebook chats, and decrypting mail.ru emails, according to the Snowden documents.

But there are others that NSA cryptologists have had a much tougher time defeating, Der Spiegel noted, as documented in their sorting of threats "into five levels corresponding to the degree of the difficulty of the attack and the outcome, ranging from 'trivial' to a 'catastrophic.'"

"Things first become troublesome at the fourth level," according to Der Spiegel, which culled its report from a specific NSA presentation on Internet security.

As of 2012, the agency was having "major problems in its attempts to decrypt messages sent through heavily encrypted email service providers like Zoho or in monitoring users of the Tor network," the newspaper reported. Other "major," or fourth-level challenges included open-source protocols like Truecrypt and OTR instant-messaging encryption.

"Experts agree it is far more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate open source software programs than many of the closed systems developed by companies like Apple and Microsoft. Since anyone can view free and open source software, it becomes difficult to insert secret back doors without it being noticed," Der Spiegel noted.

The toughest method of Internet communication for the NSA to crack? It's not any one dark Internet tool but rather a bunch of them layered on top of each other, according to the Snowden documents.

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NSA Docs Reveal Spy-Proof Encryption Tools

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