The Guardian newspaper published slides leaked by Edward Snowden that detail a secret US surveillance system known as XKeyscore. It reportedly enables American intelligence to monitor “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23522565 A series of slides describing XKeyscore, dated 2008, make it clear that the security agency system is collecting a huge amount of data on Internet activity around the globe, from chats on social networks to browsing of Web sites and searches on Google Maps.
Some of the servers the agency uses are run by foreign intelligence services of friendly nations, including Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, but other servers may be on the soil of countries unaware the agency is mining Internet “pipes” on their soil. Some of the harvesting of data takes place on the coasts of the United States, and along the Mexican border. Most sites are in Europe, the Middle East, and along the borders of India, Pakistan, and China. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/us/nsa-surveillance.html?pagewanted=2&ref=world
The presentation says the system enables analysts to identify and pursue leads even if they do not yet know the name, or the e-mail address, of a suspect. “A large amount of time spent on the Web is performing actions that are anonymous,” it explains.
The programme includes real-time data and suggests analysts could narrow searches through use of so-called metadata also stored by the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s electronic intelligence organisation.
For the first time, the government acknowledged publicly that by using what it calls “hop analysis” it can scour the phone calls of millions of Americans in the hunt for just one suspect. If the average person calls 40 unique people, such three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.
Senator Richard Durbin said: “What’s being described as a very narrow programme is really a very broad programme.”
But the head of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, remained unapologetic about the agency’s methods at a hacker conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
