THE SURVEILLANCE ENGINE: HOW THE NSA BUILT ITS OWN SECRET GOOGLE
Search engine accesses 850
billion records
Image Credits: CreativeTime
Reports / Flickr
by RYAN GALLAGHER | THE INTERCEPT | AUGUST
25, 2014
The National Security Agency
is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a
“Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about
phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to
classified documents obtained by The Intercept.
The documents provide the
first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of
surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies.
Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key
participants.
ICREACH contains information
on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of
records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided
to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Earlier revelations sourced
to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for
collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it
shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but
details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in
secrecy.
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