9/11 inside the White House emergency bunker

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On July 24, the US National Archives released a series of 356 never-before-seen photos, most of them taken on September 11, 2001 inside the emergency bunker under the White House.

The bunker is officially called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), but White House officials also call it the shelter. It was constructed in 1942 underneath the East Wing of the White House, which was primarily built to cover the building of the bunker. It is said the PEOC can withstand the blast overpressure from a nuclear detonation.

One of the very few photos from inside the PEOC available before the recent release
(White House photo - Click to enlarge)

The photos were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Colette Neirouz Hanna, coordinating producer for the FRONTLINE documentary film team. They focus on the reaction from then-vice president Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials during the terrorist attacks.


How Cheney reached the White House emergency bunker was reconstructed in the official report of the 9/11 Commission, which was issued on July 22, 2004:

American 77 began turning south, away from the White House, at 9:34. It continued heading south for roughly a minute, before turning west and beginning to circle back. This news prompted the Secret Service to order the immediate evacuation of the Vice President just before 9:36. Agents propelled him out of his chair and told him he had to get to the bunker.The Vice President entered the underground tunnel leading to the shelter at 9:37.

Once inside, Vice President Cheney and the agents paused in an area of the tunnel that had a secure phone, a bench, and television. The Vice President asked to speak to the President, but it took time for the call to be connected. He learned in the tunnel that the Pentagon had been hit, and he saw television coverage of smoke coming from the building.

The Secret Service logged Mrs. Cheney’s arrival at the White House at 9:52, and she joined her husband in the tunnel. According to contemporaneous notes, at 9:55 the Vice President was still on the phone with the President advising that three planes were missing and one had hit the Pentagon.We believe this is the same call in which the Vice President urged the President not to return to Washington. After the call ended, Mrs. Cheney and the Vice President moved from the tunnel to the shelter conference room.

The Vice President remembered placing a call to the President just after entering the shelter conference room. There is conflicting evidence about when the Vice President arrived in the shelter conference room. We have concluded, from the available evidence, that the Vice President arrived in the room shortly before 10:00, perhaps at 9:58. The Vice President recalled being told, just after his arrival, that the Air Force was trying to establish a combat air patrol over Washington.

 

Conference room

The newly released photos provide an almost 360-degree view of the conference room in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. It appears to have two installations for secure videoconferencing: one at the long side of the room and one at the short side, so it can be used from either the long side or the short side of the table.

In the picture below we see the videoconference set-up at the long side of the room. Within a wooden paneling there are two television screens with the camera in between. Right of the paneling are four digital clocks showing the time for various places around the globe, and there's also a wall map of the United States:

(White House photo by David Bohrer - Click to enlarge)

On the screen on the far left we see a videoconference taking place with four participants, including the CIA and the Department of Defense. Reports about the events on 9/11 say there was a secure videoconference in which the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense participated.


The next picture shows the videoconferencing monitors at the short side of the room, which can also be used for normal television: other photos show feeds from CNN and Fox. In the corner on the right there's a wooden door with a (mirror?) window. Next to the door on the long side wall, there's a large mirror:

(White House photo by David Bohrer - Click to enlarge)

The wall at the long side of the room opposite to the videoconferencing installation has the presidential seal, which appears behind the person leading a videoconference from the chair in which vice president Cheney was sitting, in order to show that this is the White House:

(White House photo by David Bohrer - Click to enlarge)

Looking to the right provides a view of the other corner, where we see two doors: first there's a heavy metal door opening to a room with pinkish light. Next to it, at the short side of the room, there's another door which opens to what looks like a corridor with blueish light. Some people seem to come in through that door, so maybe that corridor leads to the entrance of the bunker:

(White House photo by David Bohrer - Click to enlarge)

At 6:54 PM in the evening, president Bush arrived back at the White House and joined vice-president Cheney in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. This was captured in another series of photos. In the picture below we see Cheney and Bush, with on the right side a good view of the vault-like door, which has three heavy-duty hinges and a long downward pointing door handle:

(White House photo - Click to enlarge)

Exactly the same type of white metal door with the long door handle, can be seen in a picture from 1962 of an office next to the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing (maybe a door to the tunnel leading to the bunker? The current entrance to the PEOC is still a well-kept secret).


Viewing from a different angle, we see more of the wall at the other short side of the room, which was probably never seen before. At the left it has the door to the corridor, and in the middle there are wooden folding doors with handles and a lock. As there are already two banks of monitors for videoconferencing, these doors probably hide something else:

(White House photo - Click to enlarge)

At 9:00 PM president Bush gathered his National Security Council for a meeting in the underground shelter, as can be seen in the picture below. This makes a 360-degree view of the conference room almost complete:

(White House photo - Click to enlarge)

A close look at this photo shows that something is mirrored in the glass pane for the camera of the videoconferencing system in the short side wall of the room. It clearly looks like a world map, more specifically like an automatic daylight map, which must be at the opposite wall, right of the wooden folding doors:

 

Telephone equipment

The newly released photos show the people in the PEOC conference room regularly making phone calls, using telephones that are somewhat hidden in drawers underneath the conference table. Probably just like the table itself, the drawers are custom made for a device that can be recognized as a small version of the Integrated Services Telephone (IST):

The IST was designed by Electrospace Systems Inc. and manufactured by Raytheon as a dedicated device for the Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN) and hence was called a "red phone". The DRSN is the main secure telephone network for military command and control communications and connects all mayor US command centers and many other military facilities.

The standard version of the IST has 40 programmable buttons for access to both secure and non-secure lines (therefore sometimes called IST-40). Encryption isn't done by the phone itself, but by a network encryptor, after the switch separated secure and non-secure traffic. Although the IST phone had very futuristic looks, it was gradually replaced by the IST-2 since 2003.


The phone we see in the drawers of the PEOC conference room table are about half the size of the standard IST: instead of the 40 direct line buttons, there are just 6, replacing some of the special function buttons above the AUTOVON keypad with the four red keys for the Multilevel Precedence and Preemption (MLPP) function.

This small version of the IST is rarely seen, but it was in the collection of the JKL Museum of Telephony in Mountain Ranch, California, which unfortunately was completely destroyed by a wildfire last week.

The small version of the IST displayed
in the JKL Museum of Telephony

The ultimate test for these kind of communications systems is a real emergency situation. However, during 9/11, it came out that the Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN) didn't work like it should have. The 9/11 Commission report said:

On the morning of 9/11, the President and Vice President stayed in contact not by an open line of communication but through a series of calls. The President told us he was frustrated with the poor communications that morning. He could not reach key officials, including Secretary Rumsfeld, for a period of time. The line to the White House shelter conference room and the Vice President kept cutting off.

Besides the ISTs under the table, there's also a black telephone set, which sits on a shelf or a drawer underneath the wall map of the US. This phone is a common Lucent 8410, used in numerous offices all over the world. Here, it is part of the internal telephone network which is used for all non-secure calls both within the White House as well as with the outside world.

Vice-president Cheney using the Lucent 8410. On the conference table
at the right there's the thick laptop-like device
(White House photo - Click to enlarge)

On the corner of the conference table, there's also another kind of communications device: a black box, of which the upper part can be opened up like a laptop. The bottom part however is higher than normal notebooks, even for those days. It's also connected to a big adapter. Maybe it's a rugged and/or secure laptop for military purposes - readers who might recognize the device can post a reaction down below this article.

All three communications devices: the black Lucent 8410, the black
notebook-type of thing and the small version of the IST.
(White House photo - Click to enlarge)

 

Mysterious marking

A final photo shows then-Secretary of State Colin Powell sitting at the table in the PEOC conference room, reading a document which has a cover sheet for classified information:

The cover sheet seems of light yellowish paper and has a broad dark red border, which is a common feature for these sheets. Most of the text isn't eligable, but the lines in the upper half read like:

TOP SECRET//[....]

CRU

EYES ONLY [...]

The lines in the bottom half are probably the standard caveats and warnings that can be found on such cover sheets. With Top Secret being the classification level, and Eyes Only a well-known dissemination marking, the most intriguing are the letters CRU.


On Twitter it was suggested that CRU stands for Community Relations Unit, an FBI unit responsible for transmitting information to the White House. However, the website of the FBI says that this unit is actually part of the Office of Public Affairs, and as such is responsible for relationships with local communities and minority groups. Although that unit could stumble upon suspected terrorists, another option seems more likely:

After a 2009 FOIA request by the ACLU, a 2004 memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel about the CIA's detention program and interrogation techniques was released. The classification marking of this memo was blacked out, but on one page this was forgotten. It read: TOP SECRET/CRU/GST.

In a job posting this was written like "CRU-GST", which indicates GST is a compartment of the CRU control system. Meanwhile we also know that GST is the abbreviation of GREYSTONE, which is a compartment for information about the extraordinary rendition, interrogation and counter-terrorism programs, which the CIA established after the 9/11 attacks.

Because Powell is reading the CRU-document on September 11, 2001 itself, the CRU parent-program must have been established somewhere before that day. It's still a secret what CRU stands for, but it probably covers information about highly sensitive CIA operations.

Links and sources
- Wikipedia: Timeline for the day of the September 11 attacks
- 9/11 Myths: Dick Cheney at the PEOC
- New York Times: Essay; Inside The Bunker (2001)

Wikileaks published some of the most secret NSA reports so far

Classification - You need to decide whether you’d prefer to have a super-sharp screen or killer battery life. The Lenovo Yoga 920 lasts hours longer than the HP, and performs better in benchmarks and games with the same CPU (although if this is thanks to the Meltdown vulnerability, the playing field is effectively levelled). lasvegas, well we have collected a lot of data from the field directly and from many other blogs so very complete his discussion here about Classification, on this blog we also have to provide the latest automotive information from all the brands associated with the automobile. ok please continue reading:

(Updated: October 6, 2015)

Last Tuesday, June 23, the website Wikileaks (in cooperation with Libération and Mediapart) published a number of NSA-documents showing that between 2006 and 2012, NSA had been able to eavesdrop on the phone calls of three French presidents.

This is the first time we see actual finished intelligence reports that prove such eavesdropping, and being classified as TOP SECRET//COMINT-GAMMA they are much more sensitive than most of the documents from the Snowden-archive.

Also it seems that these new Wikileaks-documents are not from Snowden, but from another source, which could be the same as the one that leaked a database record about NSA's eavesdropping on German chancellor Merkel.

Update:
On Monday, June 29, Wikileaks published two Information Need (IN) requests and five additional intelligence reports, but the latter are not as highly classified as the ones revealed earlier.

- Intelligence reports - Tasking database records - A second source -

- Some perspective -

NSA intelligence report about an intercepted conversation between French president
François Hollande and prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, May 22, 2012.
(Watermarked by Wikileaks - Click to enlarge)

 

Intelligence reports

The reports are from various editions of the "Global SIGINT Highlights - Executive Edition" briefings. Only one report is published in the original layout with header and a disclaimer, the other ones are just transcripts, probably because they are taken from pages that also contain reports about other countries. For Wikileaks it is very unusual to disclose documents in such a selective way.

The newsletter contains or is based upon so-called Serialized Reports, which are "the primary means by which NSA provides foreign intelligence information to intelligence users", most of whom are outside the SIGINT community. Such a report can be in electrical, hard-copy, video, or digital form.

The first five intelligence reports published by Wikileaks are:

2006:
Conversation between president Jacques Chirac and foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy.
- Method: Unconventional
- Serial number: G/OO/6411-06, 271650Z
- Classification: Top Secret/Comint-Gamma

2008:
Positions of president Nicolas Sarkozy.
- Method: Unidentified
- Serial number: G/OO/503290-08, 291640Z
- Classification: Top Secret/Comint-Gamma

2010, March 24:
Conversation between the French ambassador in Washington Pierre Vimont and Sarkozy's diplomatic advisor Jean-David Levitte.
- Method: Unconventional
- Serial number: Z-3/OO/507179-10, 231635Z
- Classification: Top Secret/Comint

2011, June 11:
Conversation between president Nicolas Sarkozy and foreign minister Alain Juppé.
- Method: Unconventional
- Serial number: Z-G/OO/513370-11, 091416Z
- Classification: Top Secret/Comint-Gamma

2012, May 22:
Conversation between president François Hollande and prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault.
- Method: Foreign satellite and Unconventional
- Serial numbers: Z-G/OO/503643-12, 211549Z and Z-G/OO/503541-12, 161711Z
- Classification: Top Secret/Comint-Gamma

 
Methods

For most of the five initial, and for all five additional reports, NSA's source of the intercepted communications is "Unconventional". It's not clear what that means, but phone calls between the president and his ministers will in most cases be handled by a local switch and therefore don't go through the intercontinental submarine fiber-optic cables, where they could pass NSA's conventional filter systems for telephone and internet traffic.

For intercepting this kind of foreign government phone calls, NSA would have to have access to the public telephone exchange(s) of Paris or the private branch exchanges (PBX) of the presidential palace and important government departments.

This would indeed require unconventional methods, like those conducted by the joint NSA-CIA units of the Special Collection Service (SCS) who operate from US embassies, or NSA's hacking division TAO.

Update:
According to a book by James Bamford, NSA had an Office of Unconventional Programs in the late 1990s, which in another book was presented as NSA's own equivalent of the SCS units. It is not known whether this office still exists or has evolved into another division.
A 2010 presentation (.pdf) says that http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2014/10/the-german-operation-eikonal-as-part-of.html#rampart-a">RAMPART-A is "NSA's unconventional special access program". This is about cable tapping in cooperation with Third Party partner agencies, but seems not the means to get access to local government phone calls.

In one case, the source is "Foreign Satellite" (or FORNSAT), which is the traditional interception of the downlinks of communication satellites. This method was probably used because president Hollande visited his American counterpart in Washington a few days earlier.

In yet one other case, the method is "Unidentified", and although Wikileaks says it's about an "intercepted communication", the actual report only reflects the positions of president Sarkozy, without mentioning a conversation counterpart.

Google Earth view of the US embassy in Paris, where a joint NSA-CIA unit
of the SCS is stationed. The building in the center has a rooftop
structure that is probably used for spying purposes.
(Click to enlarge)

Classification

Looking at the classification level of the reports shows that they are TOP SECRET//COMINT-GAMMA when the president is involved in the conversation. Intercepted communications between ministers and/or top level advisors, diplomats and government officials are "only" classified as TOP SECRET//COMINT.

Three of the reports have the dissemination marking NOFORN, meaning they may not be released to foreigners. The other two may be released to officials with a need-to-know from agencies of the Five Eyes community.

Four of the reports also have the marking ORCON, meaning the originator controls dissemination of a document, for example by imposing that it has to be viewed in a secured area, or by not allowing copies to be made.

> See also: The US Classification System

The GAMMA compartment

Probably most remarkable about these reports is that they are from the GAMMA compartment, which protects highly sensitive communication intercepts. It was already used in the late 1960s for intercepted phone calls from Soviet leaders.

The overwhelming majority of the Snowden-documents is classified TOP SECRET//COMINT, with COMINT being the control system for signals intelligence which covers almost anything the NSA does. All those powerpoint presentations, wiki pages and daily business reports are therefore not the agency's biggest secrets.

It is not clear whether Snowden had access to the GAMMA compartment. So far, no such documents have been published, except for five internal NSA Wiki pages, for which the highest possible classification was TOP SECRET//SI-GAMMA/TALENT KEYHOLE/etc., but without GAMMA information being seen in them.

Only a few of the Snowden documents that have been published have a more special classification: we have seen a document from the STELLARWIND and the http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2014/07/nsa-still-uses-umbra-compartment-for.html">UMBRA control system, as well as from the ECI RAGTIME, but it is possible that Snowden found these as part of his task to move documents that were not in the right place, given their classification level.


Serial number & time stamp

Besides the source and the topic, there's also a serial number and a timestamp below each report. The time is presented according to the standard military notation. 161711Z for example stands for the 16th day, 17 hours and 11 minutes ZULU (= Greenwich Mean) Time, with the month and the year being that of the particular briefing.

The serial number is in the format for NSA's serialized reports, for example Z-G/OO/503643-12. According to the 2010 NSA SIGINT Reporter's Style and Usage Manual (.pdf), such a serial number consists of a code for the classification level, the Producer Designator Digraph (PDDG), a one-up annual number, and the last two digits of the year in which the report was issued. For the classification level, the following codes are known:

1 = Confidential(?) 2 = Secret 3 = Top Secret

S = ? E = ? I = ?

Z-G = Top Secret/Comint-Gamma Z-3 = Top Secret/Comint

The Producer Designator Digraph (PDDG) consists of a combination of two letters and/or numbers and designates a particular "collector", but it's not clear what exactly that means. The serial numbers mentioned in the reports about France all have OO as PDDG. That one is not associated with a specific interception facility, and therefore it might be a dummy used to actually hide the source in reports for people outside the agency.

> See also: http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /p/sigint.html#pddg">List of Producer Designator Digraphs

Update:
Acoording to the 1996 book Secret Power by Nicky Hager, the five UKUSA partners have the following identification codes: GCHQ: AA, DSD: EE, GCSB: II, NSA: OO, CSE: UU, which indicates that OO in the serialized report numbers means they were produced by NSA.

 

Tasking database records

Besides the NSA intelligence reports, Wikileaks also published an database extract which includes the (landline and/or mobile) phone numbers of significant French political and economic targets, including the office of the President.

Because this list is about phone numbers, it seems most likely from a database system codenamed OCTAVE, which kept the selectors used for instructing the various collection facilities. It was reportedly replaced by the Unified Targeting Tool (UTT) in 2011.

Entries from an NSA tasking database with French government targets
(Source: Wikileaks - Click to enlarge)

TOPI: Stands for Target Office of Primary Interest, which is the NSA unit in the Analysis & Production division where the interceptions are analysed and intelligence reports are produced. In the list we see the following TOPIs, all part of the so-called Product Line for International Security Issues (S2C):

S2C13: Europe, Strategic Partnerships & Energy SIGDEV *
S2C32: European States Branch
S2C51: (unknown)

Selector: Shows the particular identifier to select the communications that have to be collected, in this case a phone number. +33 is the country code for France, the third digit being a 1 means that it's a landline (Paris area code), being a 6 means it's a mobile phone.

Subscriber_ID: A description of the subscriber of the selector phone number:

- President of the Republic (cell phone)
- Presidential advisor for Africa (landline, date: 101215)
- Director for Global Public Property of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (cell phone)
- Government communications center at the Elysée palace (landline)
- Diplomatic advisor at the Elysée palace (cell phone)
- Secretary general at the Elysée palace (cell phone)
- Spokesman of the foreign minister (cell phone)
- Cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE, cell phone)
- Presidential advisor for Africa (landline, date: 101214)
- Secretary of State for European Affairs (cell phone)
- Secretary of State for Trade (cell phone)
- Ministry of Agriculture SWBD (landline)
- Ministry of Finance, Economy and Budget (landline, for S2C32)
- Ministry of Finance, Economy and Budget (landline, for S2C51)
- Government air transportation wing (landline)

Information_Need: The collection requirement derived from the National SIGINT Requirements List (NSRL), which is a daily updated compendium of the tasks given to the various Signals Intelligence collection units around the world. These needs have a code number, consisting of the year in which the need was established, followed by a number that refers to a specific topic:

165: France: Political Affairs
204: France: Economic Developments
388: Germany: Political Affairs (see Merkel-entry below)
1136: European Union: Political Affairs
2777: Multi-country: International Finance developments

From all its allies, the US was most interested in France - according to the 1985 version of the NSRL, which fell in the hands of East Germany and was eventually returned in 1992.

TOPI_Add_Date: According to Wikileaks this is the date of tagging of the entry with the responsible TOPI. These dates seem to be in the format yymmdd, which means they are either December 14 or December 15, 2010.

Priority: The priority of the particular Information Need, likely derived from the National Intelligence Priority Framework (NIPF, a reconstruction of which can be found here). This is a huge list containing all countries and topics the US government wants to be informed about, and which prioritizes these topics with a number from 1 (highest) to 5 (lowest). As we can see in the Wikileaks-list, for France, only the president and the director for global public property of the ministry of foreign affairs have priority 2, the rest is medium level 3.

IN_Explainer: Description of the Information_Need

 

A second source

The database entries published by Wikileaks are very similar to the database record that revealed NSA's intention of eavesdropping on German chancellor Merkel back in October 2013. This record contains the number of Merkel's non-secure cell phone and several other entries just like we saw in the Wikileaks list, but it also has some additional information:

Printed version of a transcription of an NSA database
record about German chancellor Merkel

Because for Merkel only this record was available, and no finished intelligence reports like those about the French presidents, there is no hard proof that NSA succesfully intercepted her communications.

> See also: http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2013/10/how-nsa-targeted-chancellor-merkels.html">How NSA targeted chancellor Merkel's mobile phone

What many people don't realize, is that this database record about Merkel wasn't from the Snowden-documents. Der Spiegel received it from another source that was never identified, which was confirmed by Glenn Greenwald and Bruce Schneier (this seems to exclude the option that someone with access to the Snowden-documents leaked this on his own).

Because the tasking records about France are very similar, and most likely from the same database as the one about chancellor Merkel, it's very well possible that they are from the same source. Because keeping an eye on foreign governments is a legitimate task, this source is not a whistleblower. He or she could be a cryptoanarchist, or maybe even an agent of a foreign intelligence agency.

Perhaps Wikileaks itself also doesn't know who the source is, because last May, it relaunched its secure TOR-based drop box that allows anonymous submissions of sensitive materials.

During his work for the NSA, Edward Snowden was not involved with European targets. He was based in Japan, and later in Hawaii, where they are responsible for the Pacific region. His last job was supporting the regional NSA/CSS Threat Operation Center (NTOC), which counters cyber threats.

This is reflected by the intercepted content that Snowden apparently did had (legal) access to, according to a report by The Washington Post from July 5, 2014. These intercepts came "from a repository hosted at the NSA’s Kunia regional facility in Hawaii, which was shared by a group of analysts who specialize in Southeast Asian threats and targets".

 

Some perspective

French prime minister Manuel Valls strongly condemned these spying activities, but that was of course just for show. France's own foreign intelligence service DGSE is well-known for its aggressive industrial espionage against American and German companies, and for example also targeted former US president George W. Bush and foreign secretary Madeleine Albright.

On the other hand, the French government was well aware of the security risks, as in 2010 it ordered over 14.000 secure mobile phones, to be used by the president, ministers and high officials of the armed forces and the various ministries that deal with classified defence information.

This highly secure TEOREM cell phone is manufactured by the French multinational defence company Thales, and the price of a single device is said to be around 1.500,- euros. Because the TEOREM has a rather old-fashioned design and the security features don't improve usability, it was apparently not used as often as it should be...

The TEOREM secure mobile phone made by Thales
(Source: Thales leaflet - Click to enlarge)

White House response

A spokesman of the US National Security Council (NSC) told the website Ars Technica that "we do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there is a specific and validated national security purpose. This applies to ordinary citizens and world leaders alike". Later he added: "We are not targeting and will not target the communications of President Hollande."

Just as in the case of German chancellor Merkel, the past tense misses, which means the US government doesn't deny that the French president had been eavesdropped on in the past. But it seems that at least for the near future, both leaders will not be targeted by NSA anymore.



Links and sources
- Reuters.com: NSA wiretapped two French finance ministers: Wikileaks
- ArsTechnica.com: WikiLeaks publishes top secret NSA briefs showing US spied on France
- Wired.com: With its French NSA Leak, Wikileaks is Back
- Zeit.de: Was die Frankreich-Dokumente preisgeben
- LeMonde.fr: Trois présidents français espionnés par les Etats-Unis
- Tagesschau.de: NSA spähte Frankreichs Staatsspitze aus

- See also the thread on Hacker News

How GCHQ prepares for interception of phone calls from satellite links

Classification - You need to decide whether you’d prefer to have a super-sharp screen or killer battery life. The Lenovo Yoga 920 lasts hours longer than the HP, and performs better in benchmarks and games with the same CPU (although if this is thanks to the Meltdown vulnerability, the playing field is effectively levelled). lasvegas, well we have collected a lot of data from the field directly and from many other blogs so very complete his discussion here about Classification, on this blog we also have to provide the latest automotive information from all the brands associated with the automobile. ok please continue reading:

(Updated: March 17, 2015)

Most of the Snowden-revelations are about spying on the internet, but NSA and GCHQ are also conducting the more traditional collection of telephone communications that go through satellite links.

What needs to be done before phone calls can be collected, can be learned from two highly detailed technical reports from the GCHQ listening station near Bude in the UK.

These reports were published on August 31 last year by the German magazine Der Spiegel and the website The Intercept as part of a story about how Turkey is both a partner and a target for US intelligence.

Here we will analyse what's in these reports, which give an interesting impression of the techniques used to transmit telephone communications over satellite links.

Satellite dishes at the GCHQ intercept station near Bude, Cornwall, UK

Officially, such technical reports are called "informal reports", as opposed to the "serialized reports" that contain finished intelligence information for end users outside the SIGINT community.

Until now, only two of such technical reports have been disclosed, but according to an article by Der Spiegel from December 20, 2013, they are from "a bundle of documents filled with international telephone numbers and corresponding annotations" from Sigint Development (SD), which is a unit that identifies and develops new targets.

The technical reports are about test runs for new, previously unmonitored communication paths intended to "highlight the possible intelligence value" and whether certain satellite links could be "of potential interest for tasking". The reports give no indication about whether the listed numbers were eventually tasked for collection and neither about the intensity and length of any such surveillance.


Der Spiegel says these documents show that GCHQ "at least intermittently, kept tabs on entire country-to-country satellite communication links, like Germany-Georgia and Germany-Turkey, for example, of certain providers", which sounds rather indiscriminate.

However, the fact that GCHQ analysts are sampling these satellite links on whether they contain target's phone numbers, shows they are looking for the most productive links to be eventually intercepted. During the parliamentary investigation in Germany, officials from BND explained a similar way of selecting specific channels of specific satellites.

> See also: http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2015/01/german-investigation-of-cooperation.html">German investigation of the cooperation between NSA and BND (III)

Technical report nr. 35

The first technical report is number 35 from October 15, 2008. It is about four satellite links between the United Kingdom and Iraq, which were given the following case notations, starting with G2, which is NSA's identifier for the Intelsat 902 communications satellite:

- G2BCR (UK - Iraq)
- G2BBU (UK - Iraq)
- G2BCS (Iraq - UK)
- G2BBV (Iraq - UK)

The physical gateways (the satellite ground stations) for these satellite links are in the UK and in Iraq, with the UK station providing logical gateways to the Rest-of-the-World (ROW), mainly Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt.

Multiplexing and compression

By analysing the C7 channel (see below), it was confirmed that the two links from the UK to Iraq were load-sharing traffic between the Rest-of-the-World and Iraq, as was the case for the link originating in Iraq.

For an efficient transmission, the links are equipped with the DTX-600 Compression Gateway device, made by Dialogic. This is a high-capacity, multi-service, multi-rate voice and data compression system, which is able to simultaneously compress toll quality voice, fax, Voice Band Data (VBD), native data (for example, V.35), and signaling information:

This kind of voice compression equipment is installed at either end of long-distance links, like from communications satellites or submarine fiber-optic cables. Telecommunication companies try to pack as much capacity into as little physical space as possible, making it also more difficult for intelligence engineers to unpack it.


Signaling System No. 7

Most of the information in the report is derived from the so-called C7 channel. C7 is the British term for the Signaling System No. 7 as specified by ITU-T recommendations. In the US it is referred to as SS7 or CCSS7 (for Common Channel Signalling System 7).

SS7 is a set of protocols for setting up and routing telephone calls. In the SS6 and SS7 versions of this protocol, this signalling information is "out-of-band", which means it is carried in a separate signaling channel, in order to keep it apart from the end-user's audio path.

In other words, SS7 contains the metadata for telephone conversations, like the calling and the called phone numbers and a range of switching instructions. This makes the SS7 or C7 channel the first stop for intelligence agencies.


Analysis of the link

In order to see whether these four satellite links could contain traffic that is useful for foreign intelligence purposes, the analyst took some phone numbers from Iraq (country code 964), Iran (98), Syria (963) and the UK (44) and looked whether these appeared in the data of the C7 channel.

All four links had hits, both for the called and the calling number. These numbers were redacted by The Intercept, except for the terms "Non Op Kurdish Extremism" and [Kurdish] "Leadership". The report continues with a more detailed analysis of the links. As an example we look at the one between the UK and Iraq, which has the case notation G2BCR and was paired with G2BCS:

On this link, the C7 channel runs between end points that are designated with the Originating Point Code (OPC) 2-153-1 in the UK, and the Destination Point Code (DPC) 4-036-4 in Iraq. The switching device at the originating end is a Nokia DX220 ABS and at the destination end a Unid Exch.

The DTX-600 contains 11 active trunks for digital voice data that are compressed into packets of 10 milliseconds duration by using the audio data compression algorithm g.729. There is also one WC1A channel.

After decompression by a tool named SWORDFISH it came out that the location of the C7 channel is the "3rd Trunk BS19". Protocols used on this link were Cisco, IPv4, ICMP, TCP, UDP, GRE, ESP and PPTP. Similar analysis was done for the other three satellite links.

Intelsat communications satellite from the 900-series,
nine of which were launched in June 2001.

The report then has a small list of Technical Details, saying that the traffic goes via the Intelsat 902 communications satellite, but the exact frequencies of the four links are redacted, just like the Symbol Rate and the FEC Rate. FEC probably stands for Forward Error Correction, to mitigate for packet losses.

There is also a FEC RASIN number: TPC2D78R005. RASIN stands for RAdio-SIgnal Notation, which is a comprehensive, originally 10-volume NSA manual that lists the physical parameters of every known signal, all known communication links and how they are collected. It seems strange that this internal RASIN code is visible, while the FEC rate, which is common technology, is redacted.


Conclusion

The conclusion on whether these satellite links can be tasked on the collection system is: "Due to limited patching there is currently no spare tasking availability on Lopers". LOPERS is one of the main systems used by NSA for collecting telephone communications. According to Der Spiegel, some other reports concluded about tasking: "Not currently due to the data rate of the carriers."

Finally, this technical report gives the (redacted) contact details at OPA-BUDE, with OPA being the abbreviation of a yet unknown unit at the GCHQ Bude listening station in Cornwall. The last section of the report is fully blacked out by The Intercept, but the next report will show what is apparently covered there.



Technical report nr. 44

The second technical report is from December 1, 2008 and is about a satellite link between Jordan and Belgium. It has the case notation 8BBAC, with 8B being the identifier of a yet unknown communications satellite. The frequency of the link is redacted. The physical gateways are in Jordan and Belgium, with the Belgian station also providing a logical gateway to the Rest-of-the-World (ROW).

The link is an E1 carrier, which means it runs 2048 Megabit/second and has 32 timeslots (channels), which are numbered TS0 to TS31 (another widely used carrier is E3, which has an overall capacity of 34.368 Megabit/second and has 512 timeslots). Each timeslot can carry one phone call, so one E1 link can transmit up to 30 calls simultaneously. The remaining two timeslots are used for the signaling information.

The analyst found that in this case timeslots 30 and 31 were used to relay the C7 signaling information and that compression was achieved by the DTX-360B Digital Circuit Multiplication Equipment (DCME). Using this technique, one Intelsat communications satellite can relay up to 112.500 voice circuits (telephone calls) simultaneously.

The report also says that the "RLE to this link is believed to be 8BBNH. Currently in view at Sounder". RLE stands for Return Link End, which in this case would be the link back from Belgium to Jordan. SOUNDER is the covername for the GCHQ listening station at Ayios Nikolaos in Cyprus, which is apparently able to intercept the Intelsat downlink to Jordan.

The GCHQ intercept station Ayios Nikolaos (SIGAD: UKM-257) in Cyprus

Analysis of the link's metadata

The technical report says that on timeslot 30, the C7 channel runs between end points that are designated with the Originating Point Code (OPC) 4-032-5 at FAST Link GSM (now Zain) in Jordan, and the Destination Point Code (DPC) 2-014-7 at F Belgacom in Brussels, Belgium.

It's interesting to see Belgacom here, as from 2009, GCHQ got access to the cell phone roaming branch of this company by using the highly sophisticated Regin spyware suite.

From OPC 4-032-5 in Jordan, there were also transit calls via DPC 2-012-2 to some fourty countries all over the world. In addition to this, there were also transit calls to Mauritius, Finland, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Sweden, Syria and Iran via DPC 2-012-1.

On timeslot 31, the C7 channel runs between the end points 4-032-0 at FAST Link in Jordan, and 2-013-1 at F Belgacom in Brussels, Belgium. For this timeslot there were also two links with transit calls, via DPC 2-012-2 and DPC 2-012-1.

For these transit calls, the report also mentions an eight digit Circuit Identification Code (CIC). This code is used to connect the metadata in the C7 channel to the trunk and the timeslot which carry the voice part of the call. In this way, each of the 30 channels of an E1 link has a CIC associated with.

GCHQ has to know the CIC, in order to pick the right voice part from one of the content channels, after having found the target's phone number in the signaling channel.

Interface of an NSA tool with a page titled "SS7 Summary" which lists and visualizes
the number of OPC/DPC pairs accessible by various NSA fiber-optic cable
interception programs, identified by their SIGAD number.
(Screenshot from an NSA presentation
published in December 2013 - Click to enlarge)

Mapping the link

The analyst used the DEPTHGAUGE tool to map the 8BBAC satellite link. He reports that the resultant map was not fully conclusive, but that it supported the previously listed mapping. What follows is a list which seems to relate Circuit Identification Codes (CIC) to the specific TimeSlots (TS). Not all of them had yet been mapped.

The 8BBAC link was sampled for telephony data (DNR) for approximately 94 hours during the period from November 26 to December 1, 2008, by using a tool or system codenamed DRUMKIT.

Phone numbers listed in CORINTH, which could be GCHQ's telephony tasking database, were found 607 times in timeslot 30. This included both tasked and de-tasked numbers, which means numbers that were under surveillance as well as numbers for which the surveillance had been terminated. 26 numbers that were tasked at the time of the analysis had 86 hits.

In timeslot 31, there were 349 hits, 40 of which were from 14 phone numbers that were under surveillance. These hits could be viewed in DRUMROLL under the filenames 8BBAC0030 for timeslot 30 and 8BBAC0031 for timeslot 31.


DRUMROLL hits

The report lists all the hits of tasked, and a selection of the non-tasked phone numbers that were found in timeslot 30 and timeslot 31. These lists are completely blacked out, except for the terms "Turkish MFA" (= Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and "Kurdish Leadership".

According to The Intercept's reporting, NSA was regularly providing its Turkish partners with the mobile phone location data of PKK leaders, but was at the same time spying on the Turkish government.

DRUMROLL was first seen in snippets from a GCHQ document published by Der Spiegel in December 2013. It gave the hits for a satellite link with case notation 1ABCT. According to the Spiegel article, this was a communication path between Belgium and Africa.

For each of the entries there are codes or numbers under TNDEntry, TNDOffice, TNDtask and TNDzip. It is not known what TND stands for, but it could be something like Target Number Database.

Among the hits are European Union Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, the French oil and gas company Total E & P, the French transport company Thales Freight and Logistics and the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. As such lists can show both tasked and de-tasked numbers, it's not clear whether these ones were still under surveillance; the N under TNDtask could stand for "Not Active":

The technical report nr. 44 from 2008 may have similar information in the lists that were redacted.

That report then continues with a small list of Technical Details of satellite link 8BBAC, with the Symbol Rate and the FEC Rate not being redacted, like in the first report. The conclusion of the report is that "this link can be tasked on the system". According to Der Spiegel this was the answer in many of the other reports too.

Finally, also readable unlike in the first report, is the standard disclaimer that is under every document from GCHQ. It says that this "information is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and may be subject to exemption under other UK informataion legislation".

Apparently this time the editors from The Intercept forgot to redact the GCHQ's internal (non-secure) phone number and e-mail address for such disclosure requests, which normally appear blacked out in all GHCQ documents that have been disclosed.



Classification

All three technical reports we have seen are classified SECRET STRAP 1 SPOKE. The British marking STRAP 1 means that the dissemination of the document is restricted by measures from a three-level control system codenamed http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2013/12/the-british-classification-marking-strap.html">STRAP. Within that system, STRAP 1 is the lowest level.

More interesting is the NSA marking SPOKE, which also denotes a control system to limit access to the document, but is rarely seen. Other British documents marked STRAP 1 often have COMINT as their American equivalent, which is the general marking used for all information related to communications intelligence that hasn't to be more strictly controlled.

SPOKE is one of the codewords that NSA used in the past, but which were presumably abandoned in 1999. But from documents published as part of the Snowden-leaks we know that from these codewords at least SPOKE and http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2014/07/nsa-still-uses-umbra-compartment-for.html">UMBRA are still used.

Given what's in the known documents that have the SPOKE classification, it seems to cover technical information about targets, like their phone numbers and the communication links in which these can be found. The higher UMBRA marking is then probably used for the actual content, when this is collected outside the US under EO 12333 authority.

Update:
On March 12, 2015, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of the British Parliament published an extensive report about interception activities of the UK intelligence agencies, which says that GCHQ only collects data from a small number of fiber-optic cable channels ('bearers'), which are likely to contain traffic that is of intelligence value.

Links and Sources
- Wikipedia: ISDN User Part
- ZDNet.com: Invasive phone tracking: New SS7 research blows the lid off mobile security

About STELLARWIND and other mysterious classification markings

Classification - You need to decide whether you’d prefer to have a super-sharp screen or killer battery life. The Lenovo Yoga 920 lasts hours longer than the HP, and performs better in benchmarks and games with the same CPU (although if this is thanks to the Meltdown vulnerability, the playing field is effectively levelled). lasvegas, well we have collected a lot of data from the field directly and from many other blogs so very complete his discussion here about Classification, on this blog we also have to provide the latest automotive information from all the brands associated with the automobile. ok please continue reading:

(Updated: May 16, 2015)

Last week, on September 6, the US Justice Department released a declassified version of a 2004 memorandum about the STELLARWIND program.

The memorandum (pdf) is about the legality of STELLARWIND, which was a program under which NSA was authorized to collect content and metadata without the warrants that were needed previously.

Here we will not discuss the STELLARWIND program itself, but take a close look at the STELLARWIND classification marking, which causes some confusion. Also we learn about the existance of mysterious compartments that point to some highly sensitive but yet undisclosed interception programs.

> See also: http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2013/09/the-us-classification-system.html">The US Classification System

Classification marking of the 2004 DoJ memorandum about STELLARWIND

The redacted markings

The first thing we see is that two portions of the classification marking have been blacked out:


1. The redacted space beween two double slashes

This is very strange, because according to the official classification manuals, there cannot be something between two double slashes in that position (see the chart below). The classification level (in this case: Top Secret) has to be followed by the Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) control system (here: COMINT).

But as the US classification system is very complex, there are often minor mistakes in such classification lines. If we assume there was a mistake made here too, then the first term that has been blacked out could be another SCI compartment, which had to be followed by just a single slash (for example HCS for HUMINT Control System would fit the redacted space, although that marking itself isn't classified).

If there was no mistake, however, and the double slash is actually correct, then it would be a complete new category which isn't in the (public) classification manuals. This reminds of the http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2014/07/nsa-still-uses-umbra-compartment-for.html">UMBRA marking, which also appeared unexpectedly between double slashes in a classification line.

Overview of the categories and formatting for the US classification and control markings
From the Intelligence Community Classification Manual 6.0 from December 2013
(click to enlarge)

2. The redacted space directly after STELLARWIND

The second redaction starts right after the last letter of "STELLARWIND", thereby carefully hiding the category of the redacted marking, which is determined by how it is separated from the previous term. This could be by a slash, a double slash, a hyphen or a space, each indicating a different level.

In this case, the most likely option is that "STELLARWIND" is followed by a hyphen, which indicates the next term is another compartment under the COMINT control system, equal to STELLARWIND.

Classification manuals say there are undisclosed COMINT compartments which have identifiers consisting of three alphabetical characters. This would fit the redacted space as it would read like: "COMINT-STELLARWIND-ABC".

This undisclosed compartment probably also figured in some other declassified documents, where it sometimes seems to be accompanied by a sub-compartment which is identified by three numeric characters, like for example in this and this declaration where the marking could read like "COMINT-ABC 678":

Classified declaration of NSA director Alexander, April 20, 2007.

Looking at what was redacted in portions of both documents which were marked with this mysterious compartment, it seems that it's about at least two highly sensitive intelligence sources and methods. For example, pages 31-32 of this declaration (pdf) suggest that this might be obtaining metadata from specific telecom companies and search them for members or agents of particular target groups.

Classified declaration of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, May 12, 2006
TSP = Terrorist Surveillance Program; HCS = HUMINT Control System
Note that TSP and HCS are also between double slashes
(click to open the full document in pdf)

Markings with the mysterious undisclosed COMINT compartments weren't found on any of the Snowden-documents, but only on those that were declassified by the government, so it seems that Snowden had no access to information protected by these particular compartments.

The marking TSP (for Terrorist Surveillance Program), which is in some of the examples shown above, was used instead of STELLARWIND in briefing materials and documents intended for external audiences, such as Congress and the courts.



The STELLARWIND marking

So far, we looked at the two parts of the classification marking that were blacked out. But now we also have to look at the STELLARWIND marking itself, which wasn't redacted, but still causes confusion.

The classification marking of the 2004 memorandum of the Justice Department says "COMINT-STELLAR WIND" and according to the official formatting rules, this means that STELLARWIND would be part of the COMINT control system.

Note that the same memorandum had already been declassified upon a FOIA request by the ACLU in 2011, but in that version (pdf) the codeword STELLARWIND was still blacked out from the whole document. Both documents are compared here.

Classification marking of the 2004 DoJ memorandum about STELLARWIND

As COMINT is a control system for communications intercepts or Signals Intelligence, this seems to make sense. But what is confusing, is that the internal 2009 NSA classification guide (pdf) for the STELLARWIND program, which was disclosed by Edward Snowden, says something different.

Initially this guide calls STELLARWIND a "special compartment", but from the marking rules it becomes clear that it is treated as an SCI control system. Accordingly, the prescribed abbreviated marking reads: "TOP SECRET // STLW / SI // ORCON / NOFORN". In this way we can see STELLARWIND in the classification line of the following document:

Classification marking of a 2013 classified declaration (pdf) of DNI James Clapper
which was declassified on May 6, 2014
(click to enlarge)

In this document and also in a similar declaration (pdf) from 2013, the reason for the STELLARWIND classification is explained as follows:

"This declaration also contains information related to or derived from the STELLARWIND program, a controlled access signals intelligence program under presidential authorization in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. In this declaration, information pertaining to the STELLARWIND program is denoted with the special marking "STLW" and requires more restrictive handling."

STELLARWIND is also being treated as a control system in the 2009 draft report about this program written by the NSA Inspector General, although its classification line is also somewhat sloppy: there are double slashes between STLW and COMINT (should just be a single one), and only a single one between COMINT and ORCON (where there should have been double slashes as both are from different categories):

Classification marking of the 2009 report about
STELLARWIND by the NSA Inspector General
(click to read the full document)

Throughout this document, the portion markings are also not always consistent. Most of them are "TS//SI//STLW//NF", but one or two times "TS//SI-STLW//NF". But as this report is a draft, it's possible that these things have been corrected in the final version, which hasn't been disclosed or declassified yet.

The 2009 Inspector General report about STELLARWIND was one of the first documents from the Snowden-leaks to be published, and it still is one of the most informative and detailed pieces about the development of NSA's interception efforts since 9/11.


Conclusion

In the end, it doesn't make much difference whether STELLARWIND is a control system on its own, or a sub-system of COMINT, but it is remarkable that for such an important program, the people involved apparently also weren't clear about it's exact status and how to put it in the right place of a classification line.

More important though is that the declassified documents show that besides the STELLARWIND program, there's at least one COMINT-compartment with at least one sub-compartment that protect similar or related NSA collection efforts which are considered even more sensitive, but about which we can only speculate.

 

UPDATE:

On April 24, 2015, the US government declassified a 2009 report by five Inspectors General about the STELLARWIND program, after a FOIA request by The New York Times. This report, which is over 700 pages long, has the overall classification "TOP SECRET // STLW // HCS / COMINT // ORCON / NOFORN":

The overall classification marking of the 2009 Inspectors General report
about STELLARWIND, with underneath the classification line and the
header of the report of the NSA Inspector General

Included in this report is the final version of the report of the NSA Inspector General, the draft version of which we discussed above. We see that in this final version, the classification line has been corrected: there's now a double slash between COMINT and ORCON, just like it should be.

This also means that the double slash between STLW and COMINT, which initially looked like a mistake, must be correct. We also see this double slash in the overall classification marking for the entire report (which has the additional HCS (HUMINT Control System) for information from the CIA).

Apparently STELLARWIND (STLW) was not an ordinary http://lasvegasin.blogspot.com /2013/09/the-us-classification-system.html#sci">SCI control system (then there would have been only a single slash between STLW and COMINT), but a category on its own, or belongs to a category not mentioned in the publicly available government classification marking guides.

Update #2:
In a speech on May 15, 2015, former NSA Inspector General Joel Brenner said that STELLAR WIND "was not SAP’ed, because the creation of a new special access program requires Congressional notification, but it was run directly by the Office of the Vice President and put under the direct personal control of the Vice President’s counsel, David Addington" - which could maybe an explanation for the fact the program was or became a classification category on its own.