What is XKEYSCORE?
An NSA surveillance system that enables analysts to search and analyze global internet data including emails, browsing activity, and social media content in near real-time.
XKEYSCORE was described in Snowden documents as the NSA's "widest-reaching" surveillance tool.
Capabilities
- Search anyone's email, chat, and web browsing by email address, name, or phone number
- Access browsing history, search queries, and social media activity
- Monitor real-time internet activity
- No prior authorization needed for queries in many cases
Scale
- Collects data from over 700 servers at 150+ sites worldwide
- Processes billions of records daily
- Three-day rolling buffer of full internet traffic at major collection points
- Metadata stored for 30+ days; content stored for 3-5 days
Shared With
- Five Eyes partners (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand)
- Other allied intelligence agencies
Defense
- End-to-end encryption makes content collection useless
- Tor makes traffic analysis harder (but NSA has methods to attack Tor)
- Minimize metadata exposure — it's often more revealing than content
Related Terms
Five Eyes
An intelligence alliance between the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that shares surveillance data and signals intelligence. Privacy advocates consider Five Eyes countries higher risk for hosting privacy-focused services.
Metadata
Data about data. In the context of communications, metadata includes information like who you contacted, when, for how long, and from where—everything except the actual content of your message. Metadata can reveal intimate details about your life even when content is encrypted.
PRISM
A classified NSA surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 that collects data directly from major tech companies including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
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