The Rise of the NSA | 201

The Rise of the NSA | 201 even decades,” greatly diminished the possibility of Soviet deception so long as the NSA kept secret its sources. The NSA did not rely entirely on its own sensors for this global surveillance. It also formed intelligence-sharing alliances with key allies. The most important was with the British code-breaking ser- vice, GCHQ, which had achieved enormous success in World War II in using computers to crack the German Enigma cipher. This alliance expanded to include Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the so- called Five Eyes Alliance. Because over 80 percent of international phone calls and Internet traffic passed through fiber-optic cables in these five countries, the alliance had the capability of monitoring almost all phone and Internet communications. The NSA also established fruitful liaisons with the cyber services of Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Israel, Japan, and South Korea, which were often willing to provide the NSA with access to telecommunications links in their countries. These long-term allies greatly strengthened the NSA’s hand in other ways in the intelligence war. For example, the so-called James Bond © provision of the British Intelligence Services Act of 1994 allowed © officers of the GCHQ to commit illegal acts outside Britain, includ- ing planting devices to intercept data from computer servers, cell phones, and other electronic targets. And, as Snowden’s release of documents revealed in 2013 and 2014, these foreign allies fully shared their information with the NSA. Of course, the liaison between the NSA and its allies was a two- way street. In 2013, none of these other countries had a global net- work of geosynchronous sensors in outer space and under the ocean that could monitor signals from missile launching, submarines, military deployments, nuclear tests, and other matters of strategic importance to them. Nor did these allies have the cipher-breaking capabilities of the array of NSA supercomputers. The NSA had assiduously built these means at a cost of over half a trillion dol- lars and employed tens of thousands of linguists who could translate almost any dialect or language of interest. Even though these allies had their own cipher services and local capabilities, they depended on the NSA to provide them with a large | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 201 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019689