Collecting a wealth of Web activity from unencrypted Web traffic - typically, where a Web address starts with 'HTTP' instead of "HTTPS" - it serves as a first stop in a larger data collection and mining process that can then serve to pinpoint subjects (say, suspected terrorists) for further inquiry. "The pipes come in through XKeyscore, which then diverts the data through different channels, because there's just an awful lot of data."īasically, XKeyscore gives analysts a tool by which they can pluck individual data points out of a massive indexed database. The system searches emails, web pages and documents for content after the "To, From, Cc and 'Contact Us' pages"."I like to think of it as plumbing," Brown said. Snowden said that he had access to the "Xkeyscore" program when he was employed by the NSA.Īnother top-secret document from 2010 shows that analysts can search by name and email domain. "Īnd the "Xkeyscore" expose proves him right. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers has said, "Snowden is lying, there's no way he could have done this. It aroused some suspicion at the time, and was vigorously denied by US officials. Snowden has claimed that he can conduct surveillance on anyone, down to civilians and up to judges and presidents, as long as they have the appropriate email address. intelligence agencies in apprehending more than 300 terror suspects in order to "justify" surveillance to the trainees. The training PowerPoint also boasts that the "Xkeyscore" program has assisted U.S. The NSA has thus created a new database where analysts can "save" their "interesting" information "separately" for up to five years. Due to the sheer volume of monitoring data generated by "Xkeyscore", the content can only be stored in the system for 3 to 5 days, while the metadata can be stored for 1 month. In 2012 "Xkeyscore" stored 41 billion records of various types of surveillance data in one month.
#Xkeyscore search data full
However, this training material warns that searching for content within the full database will produce too many results, so analysts are advised to search for metadata first. The National Security Agency rated it as "the most widespread system" because it has more than 700 servers around the world, which shows how influential it is. Xkeyscore is the NSA's intelligence collection system that collects all the information people leave on the Internet, such as web searches, web browsing, emails, files, usernames, passwords, photos, voice calls, documents uploaded to online services, etc. However, even after taking out the metadata of its nationals to share with it, Germany has only been given lower access to Xkeyscore compared to the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of the Parliamentary Control Panel, pointed out that, once again, I heard the news that BfV and the NSA are working together and that we are not allowed to share data with secret agencies in the US. The BfV did not fully inform neither the German Data Protection Board nor the Parliamentary Control Panel about this matter. The German Data Protection Board and the House were not aware of it One of the documents obtained by Die Zei is that the responsibility of the BfV party is: to share all data to the maximum extent possible to the NSA. But the condition is that German intelligence agencies need to share metadata about their citizens to the U.S. Īfter 2 years of negotiations, the two sides finally signed a contract that gives Germany access to a copy of the NSA's Xkeyscore for analyzing data on German citizens.
In fact, the cause of the incident dates back to 2011, when the NSA demonstrated Xkeyscore's capabilities to the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), and the BfV was so intrigued that it began planning to exchange Xkeyscore with the NSA in some way. Germany's BfV takes National Metadata Exchange NSA's surveillance softwareĪccording to documents obtained by German media outlet Die Zei, Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) took the data of its nationals and traded it with the NSA to get the NSA's surveillance system. Germany's top intelligence agency submitted metadata on German nationals to the NSA simply to get the NSA's Xkeyscore system. Edited by Big Data Digest, with material from, Global Times, Guardian UK, Observer guancha.cn, reprintedĮxchange of will by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution