#GCHQ

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Edward Snowden Edward Snowden (born 1983) was an NSA contractor who disclosed classified mass surveillance programs including PRISM, XKeyscore, and bulk telephone metadata collection to journalists in June 2013, fled to Russia where he received asylum, and was charged under the Espionage Act.

Five Eyes Five Eyes is the signals intelligence alliance between the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand established under the UKUSA Agreement (1946); its collection infrastructure, including ECHELON, represents the most extensive global surveillance network ever assembled and is referenced throughout the vault's SIGINT and intelligence community subjects.

ECHELON ECHELON was the code name for the global signals intelligence collection and analysis network operated by the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand); its existence was publicly confirmed through European Parliament investigations in the late 1990s, revealing a mass surveillance architecture that intercepted civilian telephone, fax, and data communications worldwide.
UKUSA Agreement The UKUSA Agreement (1946) is the signals intelligence treaty between the United States, United Kingdom, and later Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that established the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance; it is the legal and institutional backbone of ECHELON and all subsequent mass surveillance architectures documented in this vault.

Menwith Hill The NSA's largest field station, on the Yorkshire moors near Harrogate, ground station for the CHALET and VORTEX signals satellites and a node of ECHELON, where the Lockheed software manager Margaret Newsham said she listened to intercepted telephone calls in the early 1980s.
Morwenstow GCHQ's satellite interception station on the Cornish cliffs north of Bude, built in 1971 with two 30-metre dishes against the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Intelsats, the first ground station of the ECHELON system.
United Kingdom The United Kingdom is a Five Eyes intelligence partner of the United States whose security services (MI5, MI6, GCHQ) are extensively cross-referenced in this vault; the UK hosted BCCI's global headquarters, was the base of Robert Maxwell's operations, was implicated in the Arms-to-Iraq affair, and was the home of the Paedophile Information Exchange.