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GUYS!!! PLEASE LOOK AT THIS!!!!

I’M NOT TRANSFERRING THE WHOLE WIKI PAGE, BUT IT IS WORTH LOOKING AT. EXPLAINS NSA/SNOWDEN AND OTHER STRUCTURAL DATA GATHERING ACTIVITIES. 5EYES MENTIONED!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore

#1876
XKeyscore

Excerpts to whet your appetite:

XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a formerly secret computer system first used by the United States National Security Agency for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects on a daily basis. The program has been shared with other spy agencies including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, Japan’s Defense Intelligence Headquarters and the German Bundesnachrichtendienst.

The program’s purpose was publicly revealed in July 2013, by Edward Snowden in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers. The code name was already public knowledge because it is mentioned in earlier articles, and like many other code names can also be seen in job postings, and in the online resumes of employees.
On July 3, 2014, excerpts of XKeyscore’s source code were first published by German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, a member of ARD. A team of experts analyzed the source code.

XKeyscore is a complicated system, and various authors have different interpretations of its actual capabilities. Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald explained XKeyscore as being a system which enables almost unlimited surveillance of anyone anywhere in the world, while the NSA has said that usage of the system is limited and restricted.

According to The Washington Post and national security reporter Marc Ambinder, XKeyscore is an NSA data-retrieval system which consists of a series of user interfaces, backend databases, servers and software that selects certain types of data and metadata that the NSA has already collected using other methods.

SNIP

Edward Snowden said about XKeyscore: “It’s a front end search engine” in an interview with the German Norddeutscher Rundfunk.

XKeyscore is considered a “passive” program, in that it listens, but does not transmit anything on the networks that it targets.[5] But it can trigger other systems, which perform “active” attacks through Tailored Access Operations which are “tipping”, for example, the QUANTUM family of programs, including QUANTUMINSERT, QUANTUMHAND, QUANTUMTHEORY, QUANTUMBOT and QUANTUMCOPPER and Turbulence. These run at so-called “defensive sites” including the Ramstein Air Force base in Germany, Yokota Air Base in Japan, and numerous military and non-military locations within the US. Trafficthief, a core program of Turbulence, can alert NSA analysts when their targets communicate, and trigger other software programs, so select data is “promoted” from the local XKeyscore data store to the NSA’s “corporate repositories” for long term storage.

SNIP

Article addresses “Data sources,” “Types of XKeyscore,” “Capabilities,” “Use by Foreign Partners,” many diagrams, and geeky techie topics with implications way out of texokie’s reach.

PLEASE TAKE A LOOK!! I DO NOT HAVE THE BACKGROUND TO BREAK THIS DOWN MYSELF!!!