14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not only the United Kingdom and Germany that have been collaborating with the United States’ NSA, but also Australian authorities, Snowden says.
According to The Age, Edward Snowden has identified four facilities in Australia that contribute to a key American intelligence collection program.
As classified US National Security Agency maps indicate, published by Glenn Greenwald in O Globo, a Brazilian newspaper, there are dozens of intelligence collection sites that contribute to the interception of telecommunications and Internet traffic on a global scale.
The documents reveal that the US Australian Joint Defense Facility at Pine Gap, as well as three Australian Signals Directorate facilities are among the contributors of NSA’s collection program.
Codenamed X-Keyscore, the program processes all signals before they are sorted and sent to various exploitation of different data types for analysis.
These have codenames of their own, namely Nucleon for voice data, Pinwale for video, Mainway for call records and Marina for Internet-related content.
The documents published by Greenwald indicate that this type of signal intelligence collection facilities are located in numerous countries in the world, particularly in US and allied military facilities, as well as US embassies and consulates.
In a recent turn of events, it was revealed that Germany and the United Kingdom have also been working closely with the NSA, despite the tough messages sent out by politicians from both countries and the demands for answers made to the United States.
One example is Tempora, a British-run program that saves all data that passes through the United Kingdom.
Edward Snowden has come forward a little over a month ago and revealed that the NSA had been spying not only on American citizens, but on the entire world and that no Internet data was safe from prying eyes.
He has already been offered political asylum in three countries and more could follow. However, he is pressured to make a decision regarding his final destination.