Saturday, October 17, 2015
XKEYSCORE: The NSA’s most intrusive spying software you have never heard of
Collecting the metadata from user’s cell phones has been in the news lately. The expiration of the Patriot Act and passage of the USA Freedom Act have been touted as curbing the worst abuses of the NSA for spying on American citizens, but metadata collection is not the only weapon in the NSA arsenal and XKEYSCORE, a secret program for intelligence gathering, is exponentially more intrusive and effective in collecting data from anyone with an email address.
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper in 2013, Edward Snowden said, “I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”
This controversial statement caused major headaches within the American intelligence community and denials from politicians and government agency heads.
“He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do,” countered Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) chairman of the House intelligence committee.
However, XKEYSCORE does just that. The program allows a user with access to an email address to collect data on that person across email, the internet and phone conversations. This data is stored for three to five days and the metadata collected is stored for an additional 30 to 45 days.
According to the Intercept, XKEYSCORE uses the fiber optic network to collect “pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more.”
XKEYSCORE has been likened to Google for surveillance. You type in the search query, and the program will determine who and what has been sent about it. If within the collection time frame, that information is available to whoever is using the program.
Information about XKEYSCORE has been available for years, but the sheer amount of information that can be collected by the program is just now coming to light. As more documents are released from the Edward Snowden trove, the details of these intelligence programs show that the NSA and the American Government have kept the full truth of their surveillance activities secret.
