New Delhi: The National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States had purportedly kick-started plans to install a super-spy software named ‘Apparition’ in New Delhi, a recent ‘top secret’-marked NSA document leaked by CIA contractor-turned whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed.
Under a sub-heading “Future Plans”, the December 11, 2008, document says: “Plans are well advanced to install Apparitions at SCS sites in New Delhi, Ankara, Kuwait, and Istanbul before the end of this year.”
SCS stands for Special Collection Service, a secretive programme by US’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the NSA aimed at inserting eavesdropping equipment in inaccessible areas such as in foreign embassies, foreign government installations, etc.
Reports speak of an SCS surveillance unit being set up in the embassy campus of another foreign country in New Delhi that operated under the codename Daisy. SCS also set up a unit about a mile from Osama Bin Laden’s alleged compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
A New Delhi collection site would have enabled easier access to China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other sensitive locations in the Middle East.
The Apparition programme pinpoints the locations of people accessing the Internet across sensitive locations. Subsequent intelligence information may lead to sending lethal Reaper drones to eliminate the target. The NSA document is addressed to US government entities, besides state agencies in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand — member countries of the ‘Five Eyes’ programme.
‘Five Eyes’ was first mentioned in an April, 2013, NSA document. It is an exclusive club of spy rings of five countries that collaborate to intercept information within other countries to be used for diplomatic, security, and economic benefits and gains.
“Apparition is a precision geo-location capability for targeting foreign very small aperture satellite terminals (VSAT) — an important target, because VSATs are often used by Internet cafes and foreign governments in the Middle East,” the document states.
Apparition is advanced version of the immensely successful ‘Ghosthunder’ software that “enabled a significant number of capture-kill operations against terrorists”. Rather than “chasing” the targets when they come online in a reactive approach, Apparition “targets and geo-locates”, thereby considerably reducing the response time for counter-terror operations against the target.
As an example, the document says the Apparition system, located at Japan’s Misawa Security Operations Centre, targets “VSAT terminals believed to be servicing Internet cafés used by high-value counter-terrorism (CT) targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, as well as non-CT targets in China.”
