The program can also apparently determine which computers visited a website and when, as well as searching chats, usernames, buddy lists, and cookies. An analyst has to enter only an individual e-mail address – along with a “justification” inserted into another field on the screen – to get a trove of personal e-mail sorted by time period, say analysts who reviewed the slides for the Monitor.Ĭitrus crisis: As an iconic Florida crop fades, another tree rises The program, called XKeyscore, is the “widest-reaching” Internet surveillance system, according to one of several analyst “training” documents, which included a 32-slide presentation leaked to The Guardian. “It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.'īut the new Guardian leak appears to indicate something at least close to such capability. Mike Rogers (R) of Michigan, chairman of the House intelligence committee, rejected that claim. In revealing the NSA metadata program, leaker Edward Snowden told the Guardian in June: 'I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal e-mail.' The concern is that the capabilities could be misused or misdirected at innocents. But the tools discussed in the new Guardian documents apparently go beyond mere collection, allowing the agency to sift through the haystack of digital global communications to find the needle of terrorist activity. The NSA's collection of 'metadata' – basic call logs of phone numbers, time of the call, and duration of calls – is now well-known, with the Senate holding a hearing on the subject this week.

Top-secret documents leaked to The Guardian newspaper have set off a new round of debate over National Security Agency surveillance of electronic communications, with some cyber experts saying the trove reveals new and more dangerous means of digital snooping, while some members of Congress suggested that interpretation was incorrect.

Xkeyscore search data