The search engine in the NSA contains more than 850 billion records
As part of the project, The Intercept has published another portion of documents transmitted by Edward Snowden to the media. These documents describe the search engine ICReach , working in the NSA.
The search engine, as stated in the presentation , has a simple interface similar to Google. It performs full-text search for more than 850 billion records with confidential information: this is the metadata of telephone conversations (called numbers, time and place of the call), e-mail (sender and recipient names, time of sending) and Internet chats, faxes, cell phone coordinates, etc. . (total 30 types of data).
Although the system does not directly index the text of messages, but only metadata, but this is also very valuable information for intelligence. For example, you can quickly make a list of all people who called a specific phone number during the year. Or make a list of all the people who were on a certain street or square from 20:00 to 21:00 and had a mobile phone with them.
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Previously published documents from Snowden told about a variety of mass information gathering programs that work for the NSA. Now the picture becomes clearer how this information is processed and how other agencies get access to it.
A memo from 2010 says that the ICReach interface is available to more than 1,000 analysts from 23 federal agencies.
In another office note from 2007, it is reported that the ICReach system was started to be developed in 2005 and it significantly expanded the capacity of the NSA to process and analyze data.
“For the first time, ICReach developers have provided the US intelligence community with access to communication metadata,” the document said. “Development began more than two years ago with a basic concept designed to meet the growing demand of the intelligence community for such metadata and the [emerging] capabilities of the NSA to collect, process and store large amounts of communication metadata related to intelligence targets around the world.” The new search engine was developed to replace the technologically obsolete CRISSCROSS and PROTON systems, which were launched by the CIA in the 90s.
The search engine is designed with the addition of up to 5 billion entries a day (in practice, the index increased by 1-2 billion entries per day). Apparently, the search engine indexed the contents of several databases, which were replenished independently of each other within the framework of various communications interception programs operating in the NSA.
The pilot version of ICReach was launched in 2007 and it increased the volume of metadata 12 times that the security services shared among themselves.
Initially it was assumed that the search engine service would cost from $ 2.5 million to $ 4.5 million per year. But in 2010 it was planned to upgrade the system in order to expand the index beyond 850 billion records, so that the budget could increase.
The search engine, as stated in the presentation , has a simple interface similar to Google. It performs full-text search for more than 850 billion records with confidential information: this is the metadata of telephone conversations (called numbers, time and place of the call), e-mail (sender and recipient names, time of sending) and Internet chats, faxes, cell phone coordinates, etc. . (total 30 types of data).
Although the system does not directly index the text of messages, but only metadata, but this is also very valuable information for intelligence. For example, you can quickly make a list of all people who called a specific phone number during the year. Or make a list of all the people who were on a certain street or square from 20:00 to 21:00 and had a mobile phone with them.
')
Previously published documents from Snowden told about a variety of mass information gathering programs that work for the NSA. Now the picture becomes clearer how this information is processed and how other agencies get access to it.
A memo from 2010 says that the ICReach interface is available to more than 1,000 analysts from 23 federal agencies.
In another office note from 2007, it is reported that the ICReach system was started to be developed in 2005 and it significantly expanded the capacity of the NSA to process and analyze data.
“For the first time, ICReach developers have provided the US intelligence community with access to communication metadata,” the document said. “Development began more than two years ago with a basic concept designed to meet the growing demand of the intelligence community for such metadata and the [emerging] capabilities of the NSA to collect, process and store large amounts of communication metadata related to intelligence targets around the world.” The new search engine was developed to replace the technologically obsolete CRISSCROSS and PROTON systems, which were launched by the CIA in the 90s.
The search engine is designed with the addition of up to 5 billion entries a day (in practice, the index increased by 1-2 billion entries per day). Apparently, the search engine indexed the contents of several databases, which were replenished independently of each other within the framework of various communications interception programs operating in the NSA.
The pilot version of ICReach was launched in 2007 and it increased the volume of metadata 12 times that the security services shared among themselves.
Initially it was assumed that the search engine service would cost from $ 2.5 million to $ 4.5 million per year. But in 2010 it was planned to upgrade the system in order to expand the index beyond 850 billion records, so that the budget could increase.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/234615/
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