Insights in Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and Top Level Telecommunications equipment.
(Updated: August 6, 2026) More than 12 years after the start of the Snowden revelations in June 2013, there are still new details to be found in the ca. 1200 highly classified documents that have been released to the public. The latest finds are the result of mostly technical analysis conducted by a collective called Libroot. Since December last year, they are publishing the results in a series of…
(Updated: January 14, 2026) On January 3, 2026, the United States conducted a remarkable strike against Venezuela , during which president Maduro and his wife were captured and exfiltrated to New York. At his private residence Mar-a-Lago , US president Trump monitored this operation from a room that looks hardly secure enough to prevent adversaries from eavesdropping. Left to right: Hegseth,…
Since 1987, AT&T advertised a new secure telephone that operated according to the STU-III standard of the NSA. This was the Security-Plus Telephone , which is probably one of the rarest devices from the STU-III family. Already in 1992, AT&T replaced the Security-Plus Telephone by a completely different model that became more commonly used. Advertisement from 1987 for AT&T's Security-Plus Telephone…
(Updated: September 10, 2025) Telephone conversations can be intercepted by tapping cables, but the telephone set itself can also be manipulated in order to secretly turn it into a listening device. To prevent the latter, the US Telephone Security Group (TSG) published several standards to enhance the security of landline/desktop phones. Read more »
In my series about the phones of government leaders I will now look at Canada, where former prime minister Justin Trudeau had a rarely seen telephone on his desk: the vIPer Universal Secure Phone , which is manufactured by the American defense contractor General Dynamics. Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau with a vIPer secure phone, December 2020 (photo: Ottawa Catholic School Board -…
(Updated: June 10, 2025) US defense secretary Pete Hegseth appears to have a private computer in his office that is linked to the public internet. He wanted this computer to use the messaging app Signal , which is the preferred method of communication among Trump's government officials. Here I will look at the secretary of defense's official communications equipment and the SecDef Cables…
(Updated: May 2, 2025) Recently, the editor in chief of The Atlantic found himself in a group chat on Signal, in which president Trump's national security team discussed a military operation in Yemen. This immediately became SignalGate . Here I present the secure government equipment and networks that Trump's team should have used instead of an app on their (personal) smartphones. It will also…
(Updated: April 8, 2025) In the period between the election and the inauguration, a new US president prepares to take over the administration and gets briefed by numerous officials and agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA). Here I will present some interesting topics from the extensive 2009 Presidential Transition Book (pdf), which the NSA had prepared for Barack Obama after he…
(Updated: February 6, 2025) According to parliamentary records from The Netherlands, almost all western countries have signed, or plan to sign treaties on the exchange and protection of classified information. While many of them are public now, they replace secret agreements which date back to the 1960s. Sources For The Netherlands these treaties can easily be found via a new open source viewer…
(Updated: January 13, 2025) Since October 1, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is the new Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), succeeding Jens Stoltenberg from Norway, who had held this office since 2014. In his new function, Mr. Rutte has telephone sets for secure and non-secure calls and even a hotline with the White House. He also has a somewhat odd switch to…
( Update : July 19, 2024) This time a second blog post in Dutch about a new bill that gives Dutch intelligence and security services more leeway for operations against cyber actors. A summary in English can be found here . Technische briefing in de Eerste Kamer over de Tijdelijke wet cyberoperaties, 14 november 2023 Inleiding Op 1 december 2022 diende het kabinet bij de Tweede Kamer een voorstel…
A project called Safe and Free by the University of Texas now provides an overview of the legal framework for electronic surveillance by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in 12 democratic countries. Here, I will introduce the project and discuss some general trends, as well as the different forms of prior approval of electronic surveillance operations. Since the start of the Snowden…
( Update : December 24, 2023) This time a blog post in Dutch about the temporary act that gives Dutch intelligence and security services more leeway for "operations against countries with an offensive cyber program directed against The Netherlands". Wetgevingsoverleg in de Tweede Kamer over de Tijdelijke wet cyberoperaties, 16 oktober 2023 Inleiding Momenteel behandelt de Eerste Kamer de…
(Updated: September 20, 2025) For decades, the organizational structure of the NSA was classified, but since 2013 the Snowden documents provided hundreds of designators of internal divisions, branches and units, which allowed me to reconstruct the agency's internal structure . From 2016 to 2017, the NSA was reorganized so that many of those designators may have changed. Some recent documents,…
(Updated: September 20, 2023) It's been more than four years since the last regular publication of documents from the Snowden trove. Last year, however, some new snippets of information from the Snowden documents appeared in the PhD thesis of hacktivist Jacob Appelbaum . The new information isn't very spectacular and also quite specialistic, but still worth to make it more easily accessible. Also…
(Updated: April 7, 2025) To mark the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden revelations I will look back at some of the most notable disclosures and how they developed, based upon the most recent books and the numerous blog posts I have written here. Still, it should be noted that this overview is not a complete coverage of this wide-ranging topic. Books and archives Incentives The…
(Updated: November 14, 2024) Last month it became clear that junior airman Jack Teixeira had posted highly classified military intelligence information on a Discord server, which became known as the Discord or Pentagon Leak . Here I will discuss some additional details from the documents filed by the public prosecutor on April 26 and May 17 , which provide some more insight into Teixeira's…
(Updated: November 14, 2024) Two weeks ago, a few highly classified military maps from Pentagon appeared on social media. As more and more of such documents surfaced, this became the most significant leak since the exposure of NSA and CIA hacking tools in 2016 & 2017. Because the content of the leaked documents has already been extensively discussed by the press, I will summarize the events, take…
(Updated: October 30, 2023) On February 21, the NSA's National Security Operations Center (NSOC) celebrated its 50-year anniversary. For this occasion, I will take a close look at a range of unique historic photos from inside this "Nerve Center of NSA". NSA watch centers At the US National Security Agency (NSA) there are two major watch centers operating on a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week basis: -…
(Updated: January 11, 2023) On November 1, 2022, Bloomberg published a remarkable story about an NSA analyst who in 2013 developed and tested a new collection method that resulted in the unauthorized collection of American telephone data. Here I will provide some additional details about what that method could have been about and will also look whether these so-called SIGINT Development (SIGDEV)…
(Updated: August 21, 2023) In December last year, Olaf Scholz succeeded Angela Merkel as chancellor of Germany. Since about half a year ago, he has a remarkably large red telephone at his desk, which appears to be the SINA Communicator H . This is a brand new device to conduct secure phone calls at different classification levels and part of the widely-used SINA architecture . German chancellor…
(Updated: May 2, 2024) On September 28, the FBI arrested Jareh S. Dalke, who attempted to sell the Russians some highly classified documents which he exfiltrated within less than a month after he started working at the NSA. Court records provide a lot of interesting details about this case, but also raise a number of questions. A job at the NSA Contacting the Russians Highly classified documents…
(Updated: July 21, 2023) This weblog is not only about signals intelligence, communications security and top level telecommunications equipment, but also about the US Classification System , which is equally fascinating in all its complexities. Recently, an unprecedented photo from the FBI provided a unique look at highly classified documents which former US president Donald Trump stole from the…
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Ukrainian president Zelensky bravely leads his country in the fight against the Russian armed forces. As in any war, communications are of vital importance here too. Among Zelensky's communication systems are some interesting telephone sets , which he also uses for frequent phone calls to foreign leaders , while there are separate secure phones…
(Updated: November 13, 2023) Unprecedented developments in Denmark: a former defense minister as well as the head of the military intelligence service FE have been charged for disclosing highly classified information, for which the latter has even been imprisoned. Here I will provide more details about the arrest of FE head Lars Findsen and the charges against defense minister Claus Hjort…