In its report the Russian newspaper mentions a NSA presentation published by the Guardian at the end of July that features a global map of 700 servers making up the XKeyscore program, the NSA’s tool for collecting information about web users.
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These servers are located in 150 countries, including Moscow, Kiev and Beijing, the Vedomosti says.
The newspaper’s source close to the Russian secret services has claimed they have not checked the information yet, but suggest that the server is placed on the territory of the US embassy in Moscow.
The NSA and the US Embassy in Moscow have both declined to comment on the information.
Edward Snowden, who might help by elaborating on the issue, was unreachable yesterday, the media notes.
Several experts have told they simply do not believe the story. Andrei Kolesnikov, director of the Coordination Center for RU/РФ Top-Level Domains, said typically servers working with a huge traffic of information are easy to detect. According to Kolesnikov, the Guardian journalist who first revealed the XKeyscore, must have misunderstood its description.
Latest Snowden leak info: NSA programm XKeyscore collects 'everything a user does on the internet'
The Guardian has released more information about a program that appears to let the NSA access almost any part of a web user's digital life. A set of 2008 and 2010 training documents discuss a program called XKeyscore, which acts as a central interface for email, Facebook chat, web browsing history, and more.
According to The Guardian, XKeyscore is available not only to members of the NSA but to outside analysts like Edward Snowden, who worked as a contractor for Booz Allen before his flight to Hong Kong, and its vast database allows users to find people by email address, name, phone number, type of browser, language used, IP address, or specific keywords. Metadata is apparently used to narrow searches, but actual content like email text is also included in the database.
The Guardian reports that training materials for a program called XKeyscore show how analysts — without the review of a court or other NSA personnel — can mine extensive agency databases by giving only a broad justification for the search.
"It's very rare to be questioned on our searches," Snowden told the Guardian in June, "and even when we are, it's usually along the lines of: 'let's bulk up the justification.'"
According to the laws that govern NSA surveillance, this data can only be used to target non-Americans without a warrant, but it's not clear whether there are any technical restrictions or guidelines in place, though one slide shows analysts being required to justify their surveillance with a short web form. The NSA, nonetheless, insists that the potential for abuse is low. "XKeyscore is used as a part of NSA's lawful foreign signals intelligence collection system," it told The Guardian in a statement. "Allegations of widespread, unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data are simply not true. ... There are multiple technical, manual and supervisory checks and balances within the system to prevent deliberate misuse from occurring." The NSA claimed in documents that by 2008, XKeyscore had been used to help capture 300 terrorists.
The clearest limit on the system is simply how much information it can store. The Guardian reports that in 2012, 41 billion individual records were stored in XKeyscore over one thirty-day period