Standing queries - called "workflows" - and new fingerprints have an approval process, presumably for load issues, but individual queries are not approved beforehand but may be audited after the fact. There seems to be no access controls at all restricting how analysts can use XKEYSCORE. "At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it the ability to scale in both processing power and storage." "It is a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world," an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says. NSA documents indicate that tens of billions of records are stored in its database. These servers store "full-take data" at the collection sites - meaning that they captured all of the traffic collected - and, as of 2009, stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world's communication network, among other sources, for processing. The NSA's XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people's Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. In that short time frame, however, it seems to provide a very accurate digital fingerprint of any designated target in the world.I've been reading through the 48 classified documents about the NSA's XKEYSCORE system released by the Intercept last week. The database only has the capacity to store the massive volume of the data it collects for a few days, so essentially the XKeyscore system is best used for real time tracking of targets.
One of the limitations of XKeyscore is storage. The data can be sorted by typing in a name, email address, or IP address, or extracted through queries, such as "My target speaks German but is in Pakistan - how can I find him?" According to a Glenn Greenwald article in The Guardian, XKeyscore is a sort of custom search engine that allows analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals. XKEYSCORE is a computer system used by the NSA to search and analyze internet data from many sources worldwide, enabling almost unlimited surveillance of anyone anywhere in the world.
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