NSA Urged US Officials To 'Share Their Rolodexes' So NSA Knew Phone Numbers Of World Leaders To Track
from the well-of-course dept
The latest Snowden leak story published by the Guardian focuses on the claim that the NSA supposedly monitored the calls of 35 world leaders, but really that seems like a secondary point. The "35 world leaders" claim is based on a memo noting that a single US official shared his rolodex with the NSA, and that helped them track those world leaders, some of whom it was already tracking. But the key point here is that this was just one official, and it's clear that the NSA was seeking similar access from other officials. You can read the details here:
In one recent case, a US official provided NSA with 200 phone numbers to 35 world leaders. S2 Operations Staff immediately supplied this information to the S2 Production Centers (PCs). Despite the fact that the majority is probably available via open source, the PCs have noted 43 previously unknown phone numbers. These numbers plus several others have been tasked to OCTAVE.OCTAVE is an NSA tool for metadata, so it would appear that they were collecting the (still important) metadata on those calls, but not necessarily recording them or listening to them (caveat: "... under this program...").
But, the memo also notes that the NSA is encouraging other US officials to basically share their rolodexes at every opportunity. Perhaps that's not a surprise -- US officials are likely to do that sort of thing, but it certainly will make foreign leaders a lot more careful about exactly which phone lines they share with US colleagues.
This success leads S2 to wonder if there are NSA liaisons whose supported customers may be willing to share their rolodexes or phone lists with NSA as potential sources of intelligence. S2 welcomes such information!I'll bet they do! Also: "supported customers"?
Filed Under: nsa, nsa surveillance, rolodexes, world leaders
