XKeyscore makes PRISM look like child’s play, here’s [Glenn Greenwald reporting on the latest Snowden leak][1]:
> XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA’s “widest reaching” system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). 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.
If you read the entire post, it doesn’t get any less invasive. Greenwald notes that this tool can grab content of private messages on websites like Facebook, as well as chat communications. Because of the sheer amount of data, the information can thankfully only be stored for very short periods of time, unless otherwise flagged. But this flies in the face of the lies being told by intelligence “officials”, and these slides look pretty damning.
Thankfully, this leak includes screenshots. I didn’t want to see screenshots so much for my own curiosity as I did because I suspected they would show just how trivial this process is. Indeed, the screenshots very much show that. These programs work off of very simple search fields with drop down boxes — they actually looks more useable than a lot of websites.
The “best” part: there’s a “justification” box, to which Snowden says:
> Some searches conducted by NSA analysts are periodically reviewed by their supervisors within the NSA. “It’s very rare to be questioned on our searches,” Snowden told the Guardian in June, “and even when we are, it’s usually along the lines of: ‘let’s bulk up the justification’.”
Well *that’s* reassuring.
[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data
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