Dishfire (stylised DISHFIRE) is a covert

global surveillance Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders. Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edwa ...

collection system and

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

run by the United States of America's

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collectio ...

(NSA) and the United Kingdom's

Government Communications Headquarters Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the ...

(GCHQ) that collects hundreds of millions of text messages on a daily basis from around the world. A related analytic tool is known as Prefer.

Details

The database is operated by the following agencies: * United States of America –

(NSA) * United Kingdom –

(GCHQ) The existence of the database was revealed in 2014 based on documents disclosed by whistleblower

Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and s ...

. According to Snowden's documents, Britain's

(GCHQ) has been given full access to the Dishfire database, which the agency uses to obtain personal information of Britons by exploiting a legal loophole.

Scope of surveillance

Each day, Dishfire collects the following amounts of data: *

Geolocation Geopositioning, also known as geotracking, geolocalization, geolocating, geolocation, or geoposition fixing, is the process of determining or estimating the geographic position of an object. Geopositioning yields a set of geographic coordinates ...

data of more than 76,000 text messages and other travel information * Over 110,000 names, gathered from electronic

business card Business cards are cards bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid. A business card typically includes the giver's name, company or business ...

s * Over 800,000

financial transaction A financial transaction is an agreement, or communication, between a buyer and seller to exchange goods, services, or assets for payment. Any transaction involves a change in the status of the finances of two or more businesses or individuals. ...

s that are either gathered from text-to-text payments or from linking

credit card A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...

s to phone users * Details of 1.6 million border crossings based on the interception of network roaming alerts * Over 5 million missed call alerts * About 200 million text messages from around the world The press highlighted some quotes from the internal presentations highlighting the intent of this operation: one leaked GCHQ document said that DISHFIRE “collects pretty much everything it can, so you can see SMS from a selector which is not targeted.” The bulk collection was therefore suggested in this document as “particularly useful for the development of new targets, since it is possible to examine the content of messages sent months or even years ''before'' the target was known to be of interest.” (emphasis in original) In response, a spokeswoman of the NSA describes the database as follows: "Dishfire is a system that processes and stores lawfully collected SMS data. Because some SMS data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire."

Data processing

Dishfire is typically exploited with an analytical tool known as the Prefer program (stylised PREFER), which processes

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

messages to extract information including contacts from missed call alerts, location from roaming and travel alerts, financial information from bank alerts and payments, and names from electronic business cards.

Reactions

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public limited company, plc () is a British Multinational corporation, multinational Telephone company, telecommunications company. Its registered office and Headquarters, global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It ...

representative declared in the breaking news story on

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...

that “It’s the first we’ve heard about it and naturally we’re shocked and surprised.” He went on to say that Dishfire was probably circumventing UK law. According to Channel 4's Geoff White, "the Dishfire system gives GCHQ a legal loophole to get such information without needing a RIPA request. That's because the text messages are gathered and stored by the NSA – and GCHQ's access to foreign intelligence agencies' stash of data is not covered by any UK law." Former UK Interception Commissioner Sir Swinton Thomas drew an analogy between this method of circumventing the UK interception laws and torture in a foreign country, adding that it was a “different area of course, but the concept is very similar”.

Gallery

File:NSA Dishfire.pdf, Top secret presentation that includes details of Dishfire File:NSA Dishfire2.jpg, Every day, about 200 million text messages are entered into the system File:NSA Dishfire 3.jpg, A diagram showing how data in the Dishfire repository is processed and analyzed

References