India may be working with the American National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept email, chat, VPN data, VoIP and voice call records among others. This is based on documents that were newly released by Edward Snowden to Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information and The Intercept. You can download the files here. Also see these documents that were used by The Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald for writing his book on the issue. According to these documents, India is an "Approved SIGINT partner" with the NSA. SIGINT is a common term used in intelligence circles that stands for signals Intelligence, and refers to capturing of communication between two people. Decrypting of messages, traffic analysis etc are also part of SIGINT. The agency then taps these SIGINT partnerships for creating two major programs called RAMPART-A and WINDSTOP for collecting data in transit between the source and the servers, as opposed to collecting data from each Internet company (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) separately. Considering WINDSTOP only partners with second parties, primarily the UK, to access communications into and out of Europe and Middle East, third-party partner like India should fall under RAMPART-A. [caption id="attachment_115418" align="aligncenter" width="563"] Approved SIGINT partners (click to expand)[/caption] RAMPART-A provides NSA with collection against long-haul international leased communications through special access initiatives with world-wide SIGINT partnerships. RAMPART-A has access to over 3 Terabites of data per second encompassing all communication technologies such as voice, fax, telex, modem, e-mail, internet chat, VPN, VoIP and voice call records. This program has "TURMOIL" capabilities according to the documents, which means that these sensors can…
