NSA ran covert campaign to snoop on mobile network operators

The NSA had run a covert campaign to intercept internal communications of operators and trade groups to infiltrate mobile networks worldwide, the latest revelations from documents supplied by Edward Snowden show, Computerworld reported.

The US National Security Agency undertook undisclosed operations, the Wireless Portfolio Management Office and the Target Technology Trends Center, operating as part of a programme named Auroragold, an article last week in The Intercept, which also published related documents said.

Under the programme, the GSM Association was closely monitored, and a list of 1,291 email targets or "selectors" were used to intercept internal company communications, and information about network security flaws was gathered.

According to the NSA documents, as of May 2012 the agency had collected technical information on about 70 per cent of the estimated 985 mobile phone networks worldwide , inferse.com reported.

Besides mentions of operators in Libya, China, and Iran, names of the targeted companies were not disclosed in the documents supplied by Snowden, an ex-NSA contractor now residing in Russia.

The Intercept's founding editors Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras had been instrumental in helping Snowden leak NSA documents to the public through a number of media outlets.

According to the Snowden documents, the NSA operations collected information in so-called IR.21 documents used by GSMA members to report security weaknesses and details about the encryption used by mobile operators.

The NSA has been working hard to gather as much information as was possible through cellular networks, and mobile technology as the US network growing larger, and larger.

The latest documents leaked by Snowden suggest that the goal was now, or had been, to reach as far as possible while infiltrating those broad cellular networks.

In fact, according to those documents, as of two years ago, the NSA had already gathered the technical specifications, and running details from approximately 70 per cent of the estimated 985 mobile networks that existed on the planet.

While the documents made no specific mention of what companies, or entities were inquired about, or infiltrated, they do reveal that operators in China, Iran, and Libya were all a part of this broad operation to collect technical data. The types of data tapped in the operation ranged from internal emails to network security flaws.

The documents went also to the extent of pointing out that NSA operations were collecting security weaknesses and network details – like encryptions used by these mobile service operators – to circumvent the encrypted information.