In his new book No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald revealed a number of additional details on the “craft” and tools used by the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ. While many of the capabilities and activities Greenwald details in the book were previously published in reports drawing from Edward Snowden’s vast haul of NSA documents, a number of new pieces of information have come to light—including the NSA’s and GCHQ’s efforts to use airlines’ in-flight data service to track and surveil targeted passengers in real time.

The systems—codenamed “Homing Pigeon” by the NSA and “Thieving Magpie” by the GCHQ—allowed the agencies to track which aircraft individuals under surveillance boarded based on their phone data.

“We can confirm that targets… are on board specific flights in near real time, enabling surveillance or arrest teams to be put in place in advance,” a GCHQ analyst wrote in a PowerPoint slide presentation on the program. “If they use data, we can also recover email address’s [sic], Facebook IDs, Skype addresses, etc.”

The technology allows the NSA and GCHQ to get a geographic fix on surveilled aircraft once every two minutes in transit.

Greenwald’s book also goes into greater detail on the NSA’s strategy of using compromised router hardware to gain access to the networks of foreign companies and governments. As Ars reported in December, the NSA’s catalog of tools for “Tailored Access Operations” includes a number of capabilities that require placing physical hands on a potential target’s hardware . The NSA accomplished this task by diverting systems—especially routers destined for foreign customers—to “load stations” where firmware backdoors could be installed onto them before their delivery overseas.

Greenwald asserts in his book that at the same time the US intelligence community and legislators were warning that Chinese networking vendors Huawei and ZTE were untrustworthy because of connections to China’s People’s Liberation Army, the NSA was “routinely… intercept[ing] routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.”

Greenwald cited a June 2010 report from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department in which the official wrote, “In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and the network.”