Snowden Exposes Secret NSA Program Auroragold: Cellular Spying Operation Infiltrates 70 Percent Of Global Networks

Edward Snowden says that the National Security Agency has a secret program called Auroragold. The program was designed so that the agency could take control of every telecommunication network across the globe to obtain full access to every mobile phone user on Earth.

According to Computer World, the NSA has conducted a covert campaign to intercept internal communications of operators and trade groups in order to infiltrate mobile networks worldwide, according to the latest revelations from documents supplied by Edward Snowden.

“The NSA documents show that as of May 2012 the agency had collected technical information on about 70 percent of the estimated 985 mobile phone networks worldwide.”

The Intercept, a publication that has played in integral role in helping Snowden leak NSA documents to the public through various media outlets, posted the information surrounding Auroragold in piece titled “Operation Auroragold: How The NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide.” Snowden notes that in March 2011, two weeks before the Western intervention in Libya, a secret message was delivered to the National Security Agency. An intelligence unit within the U.S. military’s Africa Command needed help to hack into Libya’s cellphone networks and monitor text messages.

The Intercept reports that, “for the NSA, the task was easy.The agency had already obtained technical information about the cellphone carriers’ internal systems by spying on documents sent among company employees, and these details would provide the perfect blueprint to help the military break into the networks.” The NSA’s assistance in the Libya operation, however, was not an isolated case.

“It was part of a much larger surveillance program—global in its scope and ramifications—targeted not just at hostile countries.”

In fact, documents provided to the Intercept by Edward Snowden show that the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally. However, it was not just hostile countries that were included in the program, the US even included countries with close ties to the US in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology as a whole. In turn, the NSA hoped to exploit the weaknesses found for surveillance purposes if needed.

If you look at the documents provided by Snowden, you can see that as of May 15, 2012, the Auroragold project touted that it had collected the technical information on 701 of the estimated 985 working networks. They also note that they have 1201 actively managed email selectors. This means that the NSA has actively monitored the content of messages sent and received of more than 1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks.

The Auroragold documents speak a lot to the GSM Association, or GSMA, which is an influential UK-headquartered trade group. The Intercept notes that the GSM Association works closely with large US-based firms including Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, and Cisco, and is currently being funded by the US government to develop privacy-enhancing technologies.

When the Aurorogold documents were shown to cellphone security experts they were alarmed at what they saw. The Snowden documents show that the NSA is actively adding “security flaws” in to the cellphone networks to gain access to the systems. In the process they are opening the doors to other hackers. Karsten Nohl, a leading cellphone security expert and cryptographer who was consulted by The Intercept about details contained in the Auroragold documents, but it bluntly.

“Collecting an inventory [like this] on world networks has big ramifications. Even if you love the NSA and you say you have nothing to hide, you should be against a policy that introduces security vulnerabilities because once NSA introduces a weakness, a vulnerability, it’s not only the NSA that can exploit it.”