Edward Snowden's 4 Most Shocking Revelations

Edward Snowden may have the handwriting of a four year old, but what he revealed is jaw-dropping.

1. The U.S. and Great Britain spy on close allies

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According to documents obtained by the German newspaper Der Spiegel, the NSA bugged the phones and fax machines of close allies in Washington, including the French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Mexican, South Korean, Indian and Turkish embassies. At the G20 summit in 2009, British Intelligence set up fake internet cafés to gather information from foreign dignitaries, many of whom are—supposedly—close allies.

2. Microsoft manufactured consumer communications products with backdoors for the NSA, helped them record Skype calls

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Microsoft assisted the NSA in breaking their own encryptions on Outlook and Hotmail before the products were brought to market, worked with the FBI to engineered their cloud storage service to give the NSA easier access through PRISM, and helps the intelligence community record Skype video calls, according to documents procured by The Guardian.

3. The NSA and British Intelligence have creepy, unfettered access to an enormous amount of international submarine fiber-optic data traffic

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Perhaps the most shocking of Snowden's revelations, documents given by Snowden to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald show that in a program code-named Tempora, Great Britain's GCHQ works closely with the NSA to tap gargantuan amounts of data from intercontinental submarine fiber optic cables that run through the United Kingdom, storing it for up to 3 days and metadata for up to 30 days. The U.S. meanwhile, has taken over the management of foreign telecommunications companies that operate international data-centers to ensure that intelligence agencies have unrestricted access to foreign communications.

4. The U.S. steals a buffet of data from Latin American corporations and governments, and spies on millions of Brazilian citizens

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The United States has used that same access to undersea fiber-optic network access to intercept Venezuelan military, security, and corporate data, and details about Mexico's state-controlled oil industry, according to the Washington Post. The U.S. has also conducted surveillance in Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil—a major target of cellular data collection according to O Globo (article in Portuguese, The Guardian version here).