14 DAY TRIAL // With Edward Snowden having revealed himself as the source of the massive leak on the US government's mass surveillance program, more and more details about the astonishing scale and scope of the program are coming out.
After info about its phone record collection and the access it has to Internet companies' data come details on yet another secret data gathering program, Boundless Informant.
The tool, built for NSA operatives, is designed to provide quick access to the type and volume of data the NSA is collecting in every country on the planet.
The tool even maps out where the NSA is focusing its attention the most. Areas in red are the most targeted, those in green the least.
The data is just for March 2013, as the focus of the surveillance could change from month to month. In March though, Iran, Pakistan, and Jordan were the biggest targets.
Also high on the list were Egypt and India. Further down is China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany, and, obviously, the US. In fact, NSA had more data coming in from the US than it had from Russia.
Overall, in one month, the NSA gathered 97 billion distinct pieces of intelligence from around the world. 14 Billion came from Iran, 13.5 billion from Pakistan, and almost 3 billion from the US.
All this data is available with a few clicks to many NSA operatives. Yet, for years, the NSA has been telling the US Congress and public that it simply can't determine how much data it gathers from Americans, that it's technologically unfeasible to do so.
What's more, it claims that it can't actually know for sure where the data it gathers originates from, so it can't tell how much is from the US.
What is getting increasingly clear is that the NSA and the US government have powers much beyond what they are willing to admit, powers that push the boundaries of legality or even go past them, and that they're going to mislead or outright lie about them.