This timeline of global surveillance disclosures from to the present day is a chronological list of the global surveillance disclosures that began in The disclosures have been largely instigated by revelations from Edward Snowden , the former National Security Agency contractor.
In April , Defense contractor Edward Snowden began downloading sensitive Western intelligence material while working for the American computer corporation Dell. In January , Snowden contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. After the U. On June 5, in the first media report based on the leaked material, [ 7 ] The Guardian exposed a top secret court order showing that the NSA had collected phone records from over million Verizon subscribers.
From to , the NSA collected vast amounts of metadata records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans via Stellar Wind , [ 25 ] which was later terminated due to operational and resource constraints. It was subsequently replaced by newer surveillance programs such as ShellTrumpet , which " processed its one trillionth metadata record " by the end of December According to the Boundless Informant , over 97 billion pieces of intelligence were collected over a day period ending in March Out of all 97 billion sets of information, about 3 billion data sets originated from U.
The Guardian revealed further details of the NSA's XKeyscore tool, which allows government analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals without prior authorization. NSA had access to Outlook. Even if there is no reason to suspect U. Previously the NTC was barred to do so, unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation. Snowden also confirmed that Stuxnet was cooperatively developed by the United States and Israel.
The telecom operators are:. Each of them were assigned a particular area of the international fiber-optic network for which they were individually responsible. Telecommunication companies who participated were "forced" to do so and had "no choice in the matter".
