After Two Years of Edward Snowden Revelations, What Have We Learned About NSA Spying?

Published May 21, 2015
Updated February 7, 2018

Dishfire

Snowden Revelations Phone

Source: iStock Photo

Every day, Dishfire strips data from over 190 million text messages. The collected information includes contacts, credit card details, and geolocation data – “pretty much everything it can,” as one leaked document explains.

EvilOlive

This NSA program grabs online data such as the sender, recipient, and time stamp of email correspondences from Internet users, including Americans. One of EvilOlive’s initial purposes was to “broaden the scope” of what data the NSA could pull into its servers.

Snowden Revelations NSA Utah

The NSA’s data collection center in Utah. Source: Wikimedia Commons

MYSTIC

Operational since 2011, MYSTIC records every telephone conversation that occurs within a particular country. Relying on the Snowden files, journalists have revealed that MYSTIC is being used in the Bahamas and one other country, which the Wikileaks organization has identified as Afghanistan.

A leaked memo describing the program says, “With proper engineering and coordination, there is little reason this capability cannot expand to other accesses (besides [redacted] and the Bahamas), provided compatible hardware and interfaces are developed and deployed.”

XKeyscore

This far-reaching system allows NSA analysts to search through the billions of data bits stripped from Internet infrastructure and handed over by telecom and tech companies. According to the XKeyscore training presentation published by The Guardian, NSA analysts were trained to find targets by looking for “Someone whose language is out of place for the region they are in” or “Someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.” As Snowden told the newspaper, “I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”

Snowden Revelations X Keyscore Map

This slide from the training presentation shows the location of Xkeyscore servers around the world. Source: The Guardian

author
John
author
John has been writing for All That Is Interesting since 2014 and now lives in Madrid, Spain, where he writes and consults on international development projects in East Africa.
editor
Savannah Cox
editor
Savannah Cox holds a Master's in International Affairs from The New School as well as a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and now serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Sheffield. Her work as a writer has also appeared on DNAinfo.