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National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers and CIA Director John Brennan

Xkeyscore is a key program used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to collect, organize, and search data. Internal NSA documents released by the Intercept describe it as a “DNI [digital network intelligence] exploitation/analytic framework.” It can be used by the NSA to search for information through specific email addresses or keywords. A document stating that the candidate names, genders, email addresses, and the term “candidacy” were used as keywords to search for information during the 2013 election for World Trade Organization director-general gives a hint of the program‘s capabilities.

Those capabilities appear to be made possible by indiscriminate data collection through online monitoring. A document dated Feb. 25, 2008, reports the NSA as having set up 700 Xkeyscore servers in some 150 locations around the world. Those servers store information collected from foreign satellite monitoring and email communications data (metadata) intercepted from deep-sea internet optical cable networks around the world for a certain length of time, along with various internet files, cookies, and other indiscriminately gathered information. According to one document, the NSA gathered some 20 billion pieces of online and telephone call information from around the world in 2012. In addition to the NSA, access rights to that vast information are also held by the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD, formerly the Defence Signals Directorate), and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE). The system amounts to a form of “intelligence imperialism” by former members of the Commonwealth of Nations.

By Ko Na-mu, staff reporter

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