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Forum Post: How The NSA Built It's Own Secret Google!!!

Posted 9 years ago on Aug. 29, 2014, 9:01 p.m. EST by quantumystic (1710) from Memphis, TN
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

BY RYAN GALLAGHER

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

architecture

ICREACH has been accessible to more than 1,000 analysts at 23 U.S. government agencies that perform intelligence work, according to a 2010 memo. A planning document from 2007 lists the DEA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as core members. Information shared through ICREACH can be used to track people’s movements, map out their networks of associates, help predict future actions, and potentially reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.

The creation of ICREACH represented a landmark moment in the history of classified U.S. government surveillance, according to the NSA documents.

“The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community,” noted a top-secret memo dated December 2007. “This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets.”

The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones. Metadata reveals information about a communication—such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called—but not the content of the message or audio of the call.

ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously reported by The Guardian, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.

unfortunately the story is too long to post in full but you can find the full story with sources here: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/25/icreach-nsa-cia-secret-google-crisscross-proton/

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[-] 2 points by elf3 (4203) 9 years ago

And yet fbi and irs claim they don't have resources to investigate id or ss theft...well why would the banks want that? They love people with bad credit who owe them lots of money, regardless if it was fraud or not...they want people to pay up. Id theft is another form of forced consumerism...just like paying taxes to fund war is. I'm sure they get write offs to write off fraud charges...if that stopped rest assured they would make you pay and lock down your life with the debt and mark you permanently with bad fico. Instead we all pay for it and for fico you may get marked negatively for having had theft ( hell banks probably sell your social) pay higher interest rate for loans. The citizenry has always been mined ...think about credit bureau tracking your every move...your race, your sex, your purchases, hell the books you check out from the library or even your google searches could factor into your fico...there is no disclosure on how fico is factored nor any laws to regulate how it is done.

[-] 2 points by turbocharger (1756) 9 years ago

Disturbing.