2026-01-21
Snowden's leak includes information not found in mainstream media
Disclaimer
- Contains politically sensitive info
- Did my research back in 2025. Published this in public in 2026-01
Archive of Snowden's leak maintained by github user iamcryptoki
Main
- Most of the atleast 200,000 documents leaked by Snowden are probably (?) sitting in the hands of a few journalists and have never reached the public. (I haven't yet figured out what legal, PR and security concerns are stopping them from publishing these documents, so I won't comment on that).
- Even the information that has reached the public contains a lot of details not published by mainstream media, as mainstream media is aimed at non-technical audience.
- Examples
- There are obviously technical details on the most famous program XKEYSCORE, which is a complicate pipeline for categorising metadata of all your internet searches.
- There are technical details on how NSA tracks graphs of social connections, by analysing metadata.
- There are technical details on international traffic switches. For example: FAIRVIEW (US-990), STORMBREW (US-983), ORANGEBLOSSOM (US-3251), SILVERZEPHYR (US-3273)
- There are technical details on various zero-days the NSA was stockpiling. For example: DEITYBOUNCE (bug in BIOS of dell poweredge server), GODSURGE (hardware bug in dell poweredge server), IRONCHEF (bug in BIOS and SMM of HP Proliant 380DL G5 machine)
- There are technical details of how NSA breaks into airgapped datacenters. For example: BULLDOZER is a malicious hardware that a spy with physical access to the server can insert into it. BULLDOZER communicates with GINSU, which is a PCIe ROM bug that may already be presented on servers inside the datacenters.
I haven't published my full notes because they're messy and incomplete. I encourage technical people to go read the actual leaked docs in more detail, and publish high quality notes.
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