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发帖数: 1 | 1 https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/how-nsas-xkeyscore-program-works-
6c10812168
Until Wednesday morning, you'd probably never heard of something called "
XKeyscore," a program that the National Security Agency itself describes as
its "widest reaching" means of gathering data from across the Internet.
According to reports shared by NSA leaker Edward Snowden with the Guardian,
is that in addition to all of the other recent revelations about the NSA's
surveillance programs, by using XKeyscore, "analysts can also search by name
, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the Internet
activity was conducted or the type of browser used."
David Brown, who co-authored the recent book "Deep State: Inside the
Government Secrecy Industry" under the pseudonym D.B. Grady, told NBC News
Wednesday the main value of XKeyscore is that it serves as a first point of
collection for massive amounts of data the NSA can now cull from digital
activities, such as a person's email or Web browsing.
"I like to think of it as plumbing," Brown said. "The pipes come in through
XKeyscore, which then diverts the data through different channels, because
there's just an awful lot of data."
Basically, XKeyscore gives analysts a tool by which they can pluck
individual data points out of a massive indexed database. 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.
"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.”
"The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much Internet data that
it can be stored only for short periods of time," the Guardian said. "
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. 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.'"
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