NSA Revelations All in One Chart

This is a plot of the NSA programs revealed in the past year according to whether they are bulk or targeted, and whether the targets of surveillance are foreign or domestic. Most of the programs fall squarely into the agency’s stated mission of foreign surveillance, but some – particularly those that are both domestic and broad-sweeping – are more controversial.

Domestic Program Name – Description

Prism – The Prism program collects data from the servers of U.S. technology companies.

Cellphone Location Test – In 2010 and 2011, the NSA tested bulk collection of location data from Americans cellphones.

Monitoring Privacy Software – The NSA collected information about users of privacy software including visitors to two Massachussetts Institute of Technology computers.

Internet Metadata – A program, ended in 2011, to sweep up domestic Internet metadata such as the To and From fields in emails.

Bullrun – Joint NSA and GCHQ effort to undermine and weaken cryptography standards and tools.

Spying on American Muslims – FBI monitored e-mail of 200 Americans including prominent Muslims such as a former Bush Administration official, two professors, an attorney and the leader of a Muslim civil rights group.

Upstream – The Upstream program collects communications transiting the Internet via commercial partners codenamed Fairview, Stormbrew, Blarney, and Oakstar.

Phone Metadata – The well-known and controversial program to collect phone call records – aka metadata – of nearly all Americans.

 

Foreign Program Name – Description

HappyFoot – An NSA effort to use Web cookies and data from phone apps to identify users’ devices and physical locations.

50,000 Implants – An NSA map of the 50,000 computers worldwide it has implanted with surveillance malware.

Dishfire – An NSA program to collect up to 200 million text messages a day worldwide.

Program to Discredit Militants – An NSA effort to spy on targets’ online sexual activity.

EgotisticalGoat / EgotisticalGiraffe – The Egotistical animal programs are techniques to track users of Tor anonymizing software.

NoseySmurf, TrackerSmurf, DreamySmurf, ParanoidSmurf – The Smurf programs get inside iPhones and Android devices, turning on microphones, tracking location, and managing power.

Angry Birds – NSA and GCHQ efforts to intercept information transmitted by phone apps, including Angry Birds.

Shotgiant – An NSA program to break into Chinese-owned Huawei networks and products.

Hacking Angela Merkel – The NSA targeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.

Turbine – A network of active command and control servers around the world that can be used for “industrial scale exploitation.”

Turmoil – A large network of clandestine surveillance “sensors” to collect data from satellites, cables, and microwave communications around the world.

WillowVixen – An NSA technique to deploy malware by sending out emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link.

Hammerchant / Hammerstein – NSA programs to spy on data sent through voice over IP calls and Virtual Private Networks.

VictoryDance – The NSA tested a technique for using drones to map “the Wi-Fi fingerprint of nearly every major town in Yemen.”

ANT catalog – Various techniques – with names like IronChef and DropoutJeep – used to inject surveillance software into Apple, Cisco, Dell and other products.

Cracking cellphone encryption – The  NSA has the capability to defeat a widely-used cellphone encryption technology.

Optic Nerve – A British program to bulk collect images from Yahoo webcam chats: “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.”

Swedish-American surveillance of Russia – A Swedish-American effort to spy on Russian leadership.

Gilgamesh – An NSA program to geolocate people’s SIM cards via Predator drones.

Co-Traveler/ FASCIA – The NSA collected 5 billion records a day of cellphone locations worldwide.

Tracfin – Tracfin amasses gigabytes of data about credit card purchases.

Wellspring – An NSA program to collect images from emails for facial recognition.