The slides explain how XKeyscore can track encrypted virtual private networks (VPN) sessions and their participants, can capture metadata on who’s using PGP (pretty good privacy) in email or who is encrypting their Word documents, which later can be decrypted. “This could allow the NSA to search broadly for systems within countries such as China or Iran by watching for the network traffic that comes from them through national firewalls, at which point the NSA could exploit those machines to have a presence within those networks.” He explains how this could give the NSA a toehold of surveillance in various countries: Complex Boolean tasking and regular expression required.Īccording to Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher, “the vulnerability fingerprints are added to serve as a filtering criteria for XKeyscore’s app engines, comprised of a worldwide distributed cluster of Linux servers attached to the NSA’s Internet backbone tap points.”.Fingerprints from TAO (tailored access operations) are loaded into XKeyscore’s application/fingerprinted engine.Show me all exploitable machines in country X FORNSAT, which means “foreign satellite collection,” refers to intercepts from satellites that process data used by other countries.F6, which is the SCS or special collection service, operating from a U.S embassy or consulate overseas.
XKEYSCORE SEARCH DATA SERIES
The following example is provided by one XKeyscore document showing a NSA target in Tehran communicating with people in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and New York.Īccording to The Washington Post and Marc Ambinder, editor of The Week, XKeyscore is a data retrieval system that consists of a series of interfaces, backend databases, software, and servers that select certain type of metadata that NSA has already collected, using other methods from wide range of different sources. The ACLU’s deputy legal director, Jameel Jaffer, told The Guardian that national security officials expressly said that a primary purpose of the new law was to enable them to collect large amounts of communications by Americans without individual warrants. individuals, but NSA analysts are permitted to intercept the communications of such individuals without a warrant if they are in contact with one of the NSA’s foreign targets. The FISA Amendments Act (2008) requires a warrant for targeting U.S. “I, sitting at my desk, (can) wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email address.” The Guardian (June 10). The program’s existence was most publicly revealed in July 2013 by Edward Snowden in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers.
Provides a series of viewers for common data types.Stores full-take data at the collection site, indexed by meta-data.“Rolling buffer” of ~3 days of ALL unfiltered data seen by XKeyscore:.The DNI presenter enables an analyst using this tool to read the content of Facebook chats or private messages. One document explains: 'At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours.Beyond emails, the XKeyscore system allows analysts to monitor a virtually unlimited array of other Internet activities, including those within social media. "Content remains on the system for only three to five days," while metadata - the data behind the data, information like email headers or the location from where you last access your email "is stored for 30 days. "The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much Internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time," the Guardian said. "Quantity" is a crucial factor here, given that the Guardian noted in Wednesday's report that the sheer amount of "communications accessible through programs such as XKeyscore is staggeringly large." Indeed, one of the slides from a set of XKeyscore training documents shared by the Guardian showed that in a single 30-day period last year, the data included “at least 41 billion total records.” 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. "I like to think of it as plumbing," Brown said.
0 kommentar(er)
