XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications

One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass
surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering
an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent
abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and
other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed
new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy
system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian,
sweeps up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents,
usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is
fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables
that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among
other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system
boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico,
Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan,
Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over
700 servers.

These servers store “full-take data” at the collection sites — meaning
that they captured all of the traffic collected — and, as of 2009,
stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. NSA
documents indicate that tens of billions of records are stored in its
database. “It is a fully distributed processing and query system that
runs on machines around the world,” an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says.
“At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it
the ability to scale in both processing power and storage.”