XKeyscore

X-Keyscore is a secret mass surveillance program run jointly by the United States' National Security Agency, Australia's Defence Signals Directorate, and New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau. It is aimed at surveillance of foreign nationals across the world, and is done with the help of over 700 servers based in "US and allied military and other facilities as well as US embassies and consulates" in several dozen countries.

A redacted presentation about X-Keyscore

The program is centered on four bases in Australia and one in New Zealand –

• Pine Gap near Alice Springs
• Shoal Bay near Darwin
• ADSCS at Geraldton
• HMAS Harman outside Canberra
• GCSB Waihopai in New Zealand.

The program's existence was revealed in July 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers. According to O Globo, X-Keyscore detects the nationality of foreigners by analyzing the language used within intercepted emails, which the paper claims has been applied to Latin America and specifically to Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Mexico. According to Der Spiegel X-Keyscore also has the ability to retroactively import several days worth of queued metadata, and the content of communications. This article lists terms entered into a search engine as an example of the metadata X-Keyscore is able to intercept.

A detailed commentary on an NSA presentation published in The Guardian in July 2013 states that the X-Keyscore system is continuously collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. The commentary also cites a document published in 2008 declaring that "At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours." According to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald even low-level NSA analysts are allowed to search and listen the communications of Americans and other people without court approval and supervision. Greenwald said low level Analysts can via systems like X-Keyscore "listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst." He added that NSA the databank with its over the years collected communications allows it analysts to search that database and to listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."

According to documents Der Spiegel acquired from Snowden, the German intelligence agencies BND (foreign intelligence) and BfV (domestic intelligence) were granted access to and used X-Keyscore. In those documents the BND agency was described as the NSA's most prolific partner in information gathering..

The NSA slides published in The Guardian during 2013 claimed that X-Keyscore had played a role in capturing 300 terrorists by 2008. This claim could not be substantiated as the redacted documents do not cite instances of terrorist interventions.

See also

• PRISM
• Fairview
• 2013 NSA Leaks