The Office of Tailored Access Operations, structured as S32, is a cyberwarfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency. It has been active since at least 1998, possibly 1997, but w
Lolcat image from an NSA presentation explaining in part the naming of the QUANTUM program
NSA's QUANTUMTHEORY overview slide with various codenames for specific types of attack and integration with other NSA systems
The NSA's listing of its Tailored Access Operations program named IRATEMONK from the NSA ANT catalog.
A reference to Tailored Access Operations in an XKeyscore slide
Edward Joseph Snowden is an American whistleblower who, as a National Security Agency intelligence contractor, disclosed classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs.
Tailored Access Operations
…and electrical engineers. The office is currently known as Office of Computer Network Operations (OCNO)." A document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden describing the unit's work says TAO has software templates allowing it to break into commonly used hardware, including "routers, switches, and firewalls…
Slide from an NSA presentation on "Google Cloud Exploitation" from its MUSCULAR program; the sketch shows where the "Public Internet" meets the internal "Google Cloud" where user data resides.
PRISM: a clandestine surveillance program under which the NSA collects user data from companies including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook and YouTube
Hong Kong rally to support Snowden, June 15, 2013