It’s no secret that the NSA has been spying on millions of citizens, both in and out of the United States and since the whole Snowden whistle blowing incident (and many more after it) we’ve come to learn more and more about how the NSA achieved this incredible feat. Now I’m not saying I agree with the NSA spying, but you have to admit, the scale of some of these “projects” is pretty staggering and technically speaking they’re rather impressive too, the fact they were secret for so long is nothing short of insane.
Now we’ve found out that the NSA is using something known as ICREACH, a custom search engine much like Google, only this one allows them to quickly sift through the 850 billion files that they keep on citizens. Not only that, but the information held is available to 23 agencies such as the FBI, the DEA and more, each of which can easily gain access to ICREACH to pull up names, addresses, phone numbers and more, even allowing them to cross reference with other users to check for emails and calls between the two.
The system uses metadata, rather than the actual contents of phone calls, emails, text messages, etc, but it does allow them to track patterns to then listen in on future phone calls, or even provide enough evidence to build a case against someone without going through the usual (and more legal) procedures.
Thank you TweakTown for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of TweakTown.
I wonder what dirt they’ve got on me… I hope they don’t give it to the cops… Just kidding, but 850 billion people is more than the worlds entire population so I wonder how accurate the article actually is.