You could read anyone's email in the world, anybody you've got an email address for. On January 26, 2014, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk asked Edward Snowden in its TV interview: 'What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?' and he answered: Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald explained XKeyscore as being a system which enables almost unlimited surveillance of anyone anywhere in the world, while the NSA has said that usage of the system is limited and restricted.Īccording to The Washington Post and national security reporter Marc Ambinder, XKeyscore is an NSA data-retrieval system which consists of a series of user interfaces, backend databases, servers and software that selects certain types of data and metadata that the NSA has already collected using other methods. XKeyscore is a complicated system and various authors have different interpretations of its actual capabilities. Recent articles mention that XKEYSCORE uses user metrics to flag certain data, such as race, sex, ethnicity, and geolocation. A team of experts analyzed the source code. On Jexcerpts of XKeyscore's source code were first published by German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, a member of ARD.

The codename was already public knowledge because it is mentioned in earlier articles, and like many other codenames can also be seen in job postings, and in the online resumes of employees.

The program's purpose was publicly revealed in July 2013 by Edward Snowden in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers. The program has been shared with other spy agencies including the Australian Signals Directorate, Communications Security Establishment Canada, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters and the German Bundesnachrichtendienst. XKeyscore or XKEYSCORE (abbreviated as XKS) is a formerly secret computer system first used by the United States National Security Agency for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects on a daily basis.

Xkeyscore search engine