The Special Collection Service of the U.S. Intelligence Community

The Special Collection Service (SCS) is not one of the 17 intelligence agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community because it is a joint operation of the CIA and NSA. The Special Collection Service, codenamed F6, is a highly classified joint U.S. Central Intelligence Agency–National Security Agency program charged with inserting eavesdropping equipment in difficult-to-reach places, such as foreign embassies, communications centers, and foreign government installations. Established in the late 1970s and headquartered in Beltsville, Maryland, the SCS has been involved in operations ranging from the Cold War to the Global War on Terrorism.

The SCS is a U.S. black budget program that has been described as the United States' "Mission Impossible force," responsible for "close surveillance, burglary, wiretapping, breaking and entering." SCS operatives are based out of U.S. embassies and consulates overseas, and operatives often use Foreign Service or Diplomatic Telecommunications Service cover when deployed. Their mission is to intercept sensitive information on espionage, nuclear arms, terrorist networks, drug trafficking and other national-security-related issues.

The SCS was established to overcome a problem in that the NSA typically intercepts communications "passively" from its various intercept facilities throughout the world, yet the increasing sophistication of foreign communications equipment renders passive interception futile and instead requires direct access to the communications equipment. The CIA, meanwhile, has access to agents specializing in clandestine operations and thus is more able to gain access to foreign communication equipment, yet lacks the NSA's expertise in communications eavesdropping. Hence, the SCS was born, combining the communications intelligence capabilities of the NSA with the covert action capabilities of the CIA in order to facilitate access to sophisticated foreign communications systems.

The map below shows the location and status of CIA/NSA Special Collection Service (SCS) eavesdropping sites as of August 13, 2010.

During October 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that SCS had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's personal mobile phone for more than 10 years. The NSA's wiretapping of European and South American leaders and citizens has sparked a diplomatic backlash from the U.S. government.

According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, SCS is part of a larger global surveillance program, STATEROOM.

STATEROOM is the code name for the highly classified signals intelligence collection program that involves intercepting international broadcast, telecommunications and internet traffic. It operates out of the diplomatic corps of countries that are signatories to the UKUSA Agreement and members of the ECHELON network including Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.

At nearly one hundred U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, STATEROOM is conducted by the Special Collection Service, which is jointly operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA).