An NSA campaign designed to intercept internal communications of operators and trade groups in order to infiltrate mobile networks worldwide has been unveiled, based on revelations from documents supplied by Edward Snowden. The U.S. National Security Agency ran two operations, the Wireless Portfolio Management Office and the Target Technology Trends Center, operating under the aegis of a program called Auroragold, an The Intercept reported on Saturday.

The operations maintained a list of 1,201 email targets and gathered information about network security flaws. The NSA documents show that as of May 2012 the agency had collected technical information on about 70 percent of the estimated 985 mobile phone networks worldwide.

The NSA operations collected information in so-called IR.21 documents used by GSMA members to report security weaknesses and details about the encryption used by mobile operators, according to the Snowden documents. The NSA used this information to circumvent encrypted communications, according to the documents.