According to documents obtained by the Washington Post, the US court that oversees the FISA-based activities, also known as the FISA Court, has given the NSA the ability to effectively spy on any country that isn’t part of the Five Eyes alliance. The countries included in the Five Eyes alliance are all English-speaking powers that are England or former English colonies. These include, The UK (who has GCHQ), Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The US is also part of the Five Eyes alliance, which is the fifth member of this English-speaking alliance. And due to agreements signed by these five countries, they have all agreed to not spy on each other. They also have various information sharing agreements among each other in order to cement these relationships legally.

What does this mean, exactly? It means that the NSA’s scope is virtually unlimited and incredibly broad and they realistically are not going to be able to filter out the citizens of 5 countries out of the hundreds they spy on every day. The court that granted the NSA these rights clearly did not give the NSA a tight enough scope within who and why they could spy. The NSA is merely spying for the sake of spying, meaning that they will continue to grow in size and scope until they have a definite mission. When a government-funded organization such as the NSA is allowed to spy as freely as they do, they’re effectively going to do everything within their power to increase their scope, which ultimately increases their power and even more importantly, their funding. After all, they did build a $1.5 billion facility in Utah to warehouse all that unnecessary surveillance.

A coalition of grassroots groups from across the political spectrum joined forces to fly an airship over the NSA’s data center in Bluffdale, Utah on Friday, June 27, 2014, to protest the government’s illegal mass surveillance program. The environmental group Greenpeace flew its 135′ long thermal airship over the data center carrying the message “NSA Illegal Spying Below”. Photo by Greenpeace

When you take into account that many of the countries in the Five Eyes alliance have already collaborated on multiple spying operations and shared that data, it comes as little surprise that the NSA is involved in such activities. These activities include the NSA cooperating with Canada to spy on diplomats and leaders in the G8 and G20 summits in Canada and the GCHQ spying on the diplomats and leaders in London at a G20 summit as well. Ultimately, even if we reduce the scope of what the NSA can do, they will merely work with their Five Eyes partners to achieve similar goals if necessary, which means that the courts (or congress) need to strictly set the goals of the NSA as opposed to the general goal of ‘national security’ and ‘terrorism’.

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Now, we are all very interested in the world of teardowns like the ones posted of new hardware on iFixit. But the teardown that occurred back in 2013 in the basement of The Guardian in London was nothing short of horrific. The backstory to this ‘teardown’ was that the Prime Minister had ordered through the Home Secretary via the GCHQ that the Snowden Files be destroyed. This ordered had been carried out by the Home Secretary and GCHQ even though their Editor-in-Chief, Alan Rusbridger, had already indicated that the files still existed elsewhere in the world. They proceeded to force the journalists to comply or else they would be tried in court.

The journalists and GCHQ agents that had arrived to supervise the event went down to the basement and took grinders to the computer components that they had ripped out of their Macs and PCs. We have taken the liberty of screenshotting the process and labeling certain components if they are mangled beyond recognition. All of these images were taken from The Guardian’s video detailing the destruction process and more. Unfortunately, we can’t embed the video since their website does not allow for that, so if you want to watch it you’ll have to head on over to that link.

Above we have what looks like the internals of two Macbooks and part of a PC’s internal and discrete GPU. As you can tell, they had them grind both the CPU and GPU on the Macbooks all the way down to the copper. They did the same with the GPU on the PC’s daughterboard and on the AMD discrete GPU card. All logic and memory was completely destroyed.

Here we have the journalists being forced to take dremel tools to their hard drive platters and PCBs.

Here is the aftermath of those dremel tools and grinders.

Below, we have what appear to be the full contents of a PC that was torn down and destroyed. We’ve labelled the different parts of the computer so you can get an idea of what was lost/destroyed. The most horrific thing to me was the fact that GCHQ made them completely destroy the CPU and cut it in half. They didn’t even force that with the hard disk platters. You can also tell that on the RAM they forced them to grind off every single memory chip in order to make sure that nothing could be saved.

This is a very sad commentary on what the government is capable of without the proper checks and balances and what we could possibly have waiting for us if we don’t take these challenges to our privacy and safety seriously. The GCHQ and the entire chain of command above them clearly overstepped their power and if you want to see more about this incident, we recommend you watch the video from where these stills were pulled. It is a good video and only available on the Guardian’s site (they clearly don’t want to give up the hits).

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