NSA documents detail monitoring of Americans’ calls, passwords, photos

New documents show the details of the NSA surveilance program and just what sort of data XKeyscore catalogs, confirming the monitoring of Americans’ phone calls, photos, passwords, documents and much more.

According to a new report from The Intercept, the amount of data XKeyscore stores and collects is much larger than originally thought by many Americans. In the wake of the Edward Snowden leak, the new documents reveal many of protocols surrounding the program.

“The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing,” their coverage details.

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When President Obama took office the NSA had  150 locations across the globe with over 700 servers, which houses “stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days.”

The documents reviewed confirms that the intercepted data included “pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more.”

The new documents detail ways that analysts can query the database for information on people based on location, nationality, and previous web traffic.

Of course, this program “XKEYSCORE played a vital role in the spies’ hacking by providing government hackers access to the email accounts of Gemalto employees.”

“The amount of work an analyst has to perform to actually break into remote computers over the Internet seems ridiculously reduced — we are talking minutes, if not seconds,” security researcher Jonathan Brossard told The Intercept. “Simple. As easy as typing a few words in Google.”

While XKeyscore has been known as an intelligence tool for years now, these new documents highlight just how advanced and far-reaching the program’s surveillance is.

Check out the full report and analysis the documents – click here