In the trove of documents provided
by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is a
treasure. It begins with a riddle: “What
do the President of Pakistan, a cigar smuggler, an arms dealer, a
counterterrorism target, and a combatting proliferation target have
in common? They all used their everyday GSM phone during a flight.”
This riddle appeared in 2010 in
SIDtoday, the internal newsletter of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence
Directorate, or SID, and it was classified “top secret.” It
announced the emergence of a new field of espionage that had not yet
been explored: the interception of data from phone calls made on
board civil aircraft. In a separate internal document from a year
earlier, the NSA reported that 50,000 people had already used their
mobile phones in flight as of December 2008, a figure that rose to
100,000 by February 2009. The NSA attributed the increase to “more
planes equipped with in-flight GSM capability, less fear that a plane
will crash due to making/receiving a call, not as expensive as people
thought.” The sky seemed to belong
to the agency.
In a 2012 presentation, Government
Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the British equivalent of the
NSA, in turn disclosed a program called “Southwinds,” which was
used to gather all the cellular activity, voice communication, data,
metadata, and content of calls on board commercial aircraft. The
document, designated “top secret strap,” one of the highest
British classification levels, said the program was still restricted
to the regions covered by satellites from British telecommunications
provider Inmarsat: Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Full
report:
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