One presentation claims the program covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet,” including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata. In his first report, he explained the scope of XKEYSCORE. Greenwald first described the details of the program in July 2013 after examining a PowerPoint presentation included in the information he received from Snowden. While the vulnerabilities of the NSA’s XKEYSCORE system are disturbing, the way it is used to gobble up gigabytes of personal data and online habits of millions of people never suspected of any crime should certainly be more alarming. Systems administrators who maintain XKEYSCORE servers use SSH to connect to them, and they use tools such as rsync and vim, as well as a comprehensive command-line tool, to manage the software. File systems in a cluster are handled by the NFS distributed file system and the autofs service, and scheduled tasks are handled by the cron scheduling service. It uses the Apache web server and stores collected data in MySQL databases. XKEYSCORE is a piece of Linux software that is typically deployed on Red Hat servers. In fact, according to an analysis of an XKEYSCORE manual for new systems administrators from the end of 2012, the system may have design deficiencies that could leave it vulnerable to attack by an intelligence agency insider. It is tempting to assume that expensive, proprietary operating systems and software must power XKEYSCORE, but it actually relies on an entirely open source stack. Analysts access XKEYSCORE’s web interface to search its wealth of private information, similar to how ordinary people can search Google for public information. This global Internet surveillance network is powered by a somewhat clunky piece of software running on clusters of Linux servers.
Surprisingly, the second installment reveals that XKEYSCORE is powerful, despite being built on some rather simple software.
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. How wide is the net cast by the NSA’s XKEYSCORE system? The Intercept reports:
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