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Snowden Documents Reveal New Details of “NSA’s Google”

HeadlineJul 02, 2015

The Intercept news site has published one of the largest releases of documents from Edward Snowden to date, revealing new details about the National Security Agency’s program XKEYSCORE. Described as “the NSA’s Google for the world’s private communications,” the program sweeps up emails, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, logged keystrokes and more. The program is fed by fiber-optic cables which form the “backbone of the world’s communication network,” with hundreds of servers around the world. The system includes traffic from Americans and allows the government to easily make queries based on criteria like nationality or the websites people have visited. One document shows government analysts used XKEYSCORE to obtain U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s talking points before a meeting with President Obama.

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