Assorted Examples
One of the documents given to Snowden’s journalist correspondents was a copy of the 2013 “Black Budget.” 68% of the money included in the budget, $52.6 billion dollars was set aside for the intelligence community and employees, both government and private contractors. This would mean the entire black budget for 2013 was $77.3 billion dollars (Snowden 113), contrasting with the ~$30 billion of 2009 (Shachtman). This means the black budget increased about 150% over the course of three years, from pre to post-Snowden leaks.
STELLARWIND was used as a surveillance tool. It was used to surveil all activities and communications of a person on the internet- phone calls, emails, searches, keystrokes. It was a topic of controversy within the government the whole time, but remained in use as neither side of congress could push forward enough to shut it down or keep it going. In Snowden’s own words; “The program's very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizen’s private internet communications as potential signals intelligence” (Snowden 177).
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After Snowden’s leaks had time to permeate, the US Director of National Intelligence encouraged an act to be implemented to cancel some of the NSA’s overreach. This took the form of The USA Freedom Act of 2015, which shut down some of the NSA’s privileges as of November 28, 2015. Among the privileges revoked were the collection of bulk metadata, revoked access to metadata collected prior to November 28th, and denial of the required call detail records from ISP companies (Office Of).
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New Zealand played a key role in the Five Eyes as well, being a primary collector of data in the Oceania region, even more so than Australia. Their primary focus was on all of the smaller island nations that dot the region. Within those countries, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) was meant to monitor “government ministers and senior officials, government agencies, international organizations and non government organizations” (Gallagher and Hager). Prior to 2009, the GCSB only monitored specified targets with precise surveillance, however that changed according to the Snowden documents which outlined the shift to “full take” surveillance. “Full Take” is a term for a dragnet style approach, attempting to gather as much information as possible on whoever, rather than targeted surveillance. However, rather than the NSA’s focus on servers or the GCHQ’s focus on fiber optic internet cables, New Zealand focused their funding into intercepting data as it traveled between satellites (Gallagher and Hager).