Pierluigi Paganini August 02, 2013

The NSA slides show that since 2008 the X-Keyscore platform was used to track activities related to 300 alleged terrorists around the world studying their habits and participations to various Internet forums.

“Analysts are warned that searching the full database for content will yield too many results to sift through. Instead they are advised to use themetadata also stored in the databases to narrow down what to review. A slide entitled “plug-ins” in a December 2012 document describes the various fields of information that can be searched. It includes “every email address seen in a session by both username and domain”, “every phone number seen in a session (eg address book entries or signature block)” and user activity – “the webmail and chat activity to include username, buddylist, machine specific cookies etc“.”

The documents revealed that in 2012 more than 41 billion records were collected and stored in a single 30-day period by XKeyscore that analyzes real time more than 20 terabytes of information (e.g. Emails, chats, social media operations and browsing histories) every day.

“The quantity of communications accessible through programs such as XKeyscore is staggeringly large. One NSA report from 2007 estimated that there were 850bn “call events” collected and stored in the NSA databases, and close to 150bn internet records. Each day, the document says, 1-2bn records were added.William Binney, a former NSA mathematician, said last year that the agency had “assembled on the order of 20tn transactions about US citizens with other US citizens”, an estimate, he said, that “only was involving phone calls and emails”. A 2010 Washington Post article reported that “every day, collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7bn emails, phone calls and other type of communications.””