By Wikipedia
The global surveillance disclosure refers to an ongoing series of news reports in the international media that revealed operational details about the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners’ mass surveillance of foreign nationals as well as U.S. citizens. The vast majority of reports emanated from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. On June 6, 2013, the first of Snowden’s documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian, attracting considerable public attention. The disclosure continued throughout the entire year of 2013, and a significant portion of the full cache of 1.5 million documents was later obtained and published by many other media outlets worldwide, most notably the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australia), O Globo (Brazil), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany), L’espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands), Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), Sveriges Television (Sweden), and The New York Times (USA).
In summary, these media reports have shed light on the implications of several secret treaties signed by members of the UKUSA Agreement in their efforts to implement global surveillance. For example, Der Speigel revealed how the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) transfers “massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA”, while Sveriges Television revealed that the Försvarets radioanstalt (FRA) of Sweden is continuously providing the NSA with intercepted data gathered from telecom cables, under a secret treaty signed in 1954 for bilateral cooperation on surveillance. Other security and intelligence agencies involved in the practice of global surveillance include those in Australia (ASD), Britain (GCHQ), Canada (CSEC), Denmark (PET), France (DGSE), Germany (BND), Italy (AISE), the Netherlands (AIVD), Norway (NIS), Spain (CNI), Switzerland (NDB), as well as Israel (ISNU), which receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens that is shared by the NSA.
