The XKeyscore NSA program covers most types of Internet activities

Jul 31, 2013 14:45 GMT  ·  By

NSA’s XKeyscore can be used to sift through emails, Edward Snowden said in an interview back in June, if the analyst has the targeted person's email address.

New documents revealed by The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald indicate that the program is used for much more than emails.

For instance, XKeyscore can search within bodies of emails, webpages, and documents, as well as the To, From, CC, and BCC lines.

Everything is done from a rather simple-looking interface that enables the analyst to fill in the query name, justification for the search, a date and time interval, and the email address. Once this is done, the XKeyscore parses out everything it thinks is an email address.

Then, the analyst can go about checking out emails through an NSA reading software.

Everything is made even worse by the method used by analysts when beginning targeted surveillance, since everything they have to do is access some pull-down menus containing generalized factors. Among the “foreign factors” the NSA listed vague claims such as “open source information indicates the person is located outside the US” or that the person “stated he is located outside the US.”

XKeyscore can be used for another purpose than reading private emails. It allows analysts to monitor a large array of Internet activities, including social media. For instance, as Greenwald says, they can monitor Facebook chats by simply entering the Facebook user name and a date range into a simple search screen.

Internet browsing activities can be searched through as well, including queries entered in various viewed websites, whether this is a search engine or a simple website search box.

The NSA can also search HTTP activity by keyword, which means analysts can access nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet.

XKeyscore further enables analysts to learn the IP addresses of all visitors of a particular website.