{"id":11710,"date":"2018-08-16T11:35:07","date_gmt":"2018-08-16T11:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=11710"},"modified":"2018-08-16T11:35:07","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T11:35:07","slug":"us-broke-into-secure-network-of-al-jazeera-and-others-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=11710","title":{"rendered":"US broke into secure network of Al Jazeera and others: report"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The National Security Agency (NSA<\/a>), a US intelligence agency tasked with collecting data for foreign and counter intelligence operations, broke into the encrypted network of the Al Jazeera Media Network<\/a> and several others in 2006, according to a report by US media.<\/p>\n

A document<\/a> provided to The Intercept by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden<\/a> shows that the NSA cracked Al Jazeera’s Virtual Private Network (VPN), an encrypted tunnel used to secure internet traffic.<\/p>\n

“Recently, NSA has decrypted a number of interesting targets … deemed by product lines to have high potential as sources of intelligence,” the document states, which is then followed by a list of targets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That list includes Al Jazeera, the Iraqi Ministry of Defence and Interior, the Iraqi state internet provider and four airlines from Russia, Paraguay and Iran<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The network that was broken into is a so-called VPN network, a digital tunnel of sorts which all internet traffic gets sent through to protect it from prying eyes.<\/p>\n

According to the document, the VPNs used by the listed companies and institutions were all decrypted, although details on how exactly this was done are not specified.<\/p>\n

The data collected after decrypting the internet traffic was “being evaluated for intelligence content.”<\/p>\n

“Hundreds of additional VPN links have also been identified and are being investigated,” it added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The documents state that at that point, the NSA had been working on trying to break VPN encryption for at least three years.<\/p>\n

In 2013, German publication Der Spiegel published an article<\/a> based on the same document, stating the NSA was spying on Al Jazeera, but the publicationdid not detail that this was done through cracking the VPN used by Al Jazeera.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is not known whether the NSA has continued the operation since 2006.<\/p>\n

Attacks and criticism\u00a0<\/h2>\n

The document is dated March 23, 2006, a time during which Al Jazeera was repeatedly criticised by then-US President George W Bush for its coverage of the Iraq war<\/a> and the war in Afghanistan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Two years earlier, in 2004, Bush allegedly discussed bombing Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha with then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to British media reports.<\/p>\n

Officials in Washington, DC have dismissed that story.<\/p>\n

Al Jazeera has been targeted multiple times by the US government, most notably several bombings of its offices.<\/p>\n

In 2001, a bomb from a US air force plane hit the Al Jazeera bureau in Kabul, Afghanistan, destroying the building, despite the US being aware of the exact coordinates of the offices.<\/p>\n

Then, in April 2006, a US bomb hit the Al Jazeera bureau in Baghdad, Iraq, killing journalist Tareq Ayyoub<\/a> and injuring one other person. US forces were again aware of the exact coordinates of the office.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The National Security Agency (NSA), a US intelligence agency tasked with collecting data for foreign and counter intelligence operations, broke into the encrypted network of the Al Jazeera Media Network and several others in 2006, according to a report by US media. A document provided to The Intercept by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden shows that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":11711,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}