What is Boundless Informant?

Boundless Informant is the NSA's own internal tool for counting how much surveillance it conducts — and it proved the NSA was lying to Congress about the scope of its data collection.

What It Does

Boundless Informant is a data visualization tool that:

• Counts every phone call and email record collected by the NSA worldwide
• Maps collection volumes by country using a heat map
• Provides real-time statistics on the NSA's global surveillance operations
• Allows analysts to drill down into collection programs and data sources

What It Revealed

When the Snowden documents were published in June 2013, Boundless Informant showed:

• 97 billion pieces of intelligence collected in a single month (March 2013)
• The top countries by collection volume included Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, and India
• The United States appeared on the heat map — the NSA was collecting significant domestic data
• 3 billion data elements were collected from US communication systems in that month alone

Why It Matters

The NSA's Lie

Before Snowden, NSA Director Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress it was "not possible" to estimate how much data the NSA collected on Americans. Boundless Informant proved this was a lie — the NSA had an internal tool that did exactly that.

James Clapper's Testimony

In March 2013, Senator Ron Wyden asked DNI Clapper: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper answered: "No, sir. Not wittingly." This was demonstrably false.

Proof of Scale

Boundless Informant transformed the surveillance debate from abstract claims about "targeted collection" to concrete numbers showing billions of records collected per month.