According to the classified documents leaked by Snowden, the Australian Signals Directorate, formerly known as the Defence Signals Directorate, had offered to share information on Australian citizens with the other intelligence agencies of the UKUSA Agreement. Data shared with foreign countries include "bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata" such as "medical, legal or religious information".[184]
The Washington Post revealed that the NSA has been tracking the locations of mobile phones from all over the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. In the process of doing so, the NSA collects more than 5 billion records of phone locations on a daily basis. This enables NSA analysts to map cellphone owners’ relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths.[185][186][187][188][189][190][191]
On 5 December, Sveriges Television (Swedish Television) reported that the National Defence Radio Establishment of Sweden (FRA) has been conducting a clandestine surveillance operation targeting the internal politics of Russia. The operation was conducted on behalf of the NSA, which receives data handed over to it by the FRA.[192][193] The Swedish-American surveillance operation also targeted Russian energy interests as well as the Baltic states.[194]
| Year | Disclosure | Size | Main source(s) | Major publisher(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Global surveillance disclosure | >200,000 documents | Edward Snowden | The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, |
| 2010 | United States diplomatic cables leak | 251,287 diplomatic cables | Chelsea Manning | The Guardian, The New York Times. Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País, WikiLeaks |
| 1971 | Pentagon Papers | 4,100 pages | Daniel Ellsberg | The New York Times |