A new report has surfaced claiming that the national security agency (NSA) has built its own Google-like search engine that it uses to share billions of digital records with several government agencies, which includes the federal law enforcement.
The search engine in question is called "ICREACH," and it is the home of around 850 billion pieces of metadata since 2007. Interestingly enough, these metadata consists of recorded calls made by but not exclusively by foreign nationals, according to a report from The Intercept.
"The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community," noted a top-secret memo dated December 2007. "This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC's increasing need for communications metadata and NSA's ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets."
What is metadata?
It is made up of communication, but not exactly the contents of a recorded message. This means the ICREACH search engine would include the time and date of a particular call, the phone number, the duration of the call, and even the IMEI number that is unique to the cell phone used to make the call.
Furthermore, the search engine could also have information on the location of where the call was made. This is advanced stuff, and since it is made by the NSA, we can't say that we are surprised at all.
We understand that while the contents of the metadata are not revealed, this doesn't matter much to the NSA. You see, when there's access to enough metadata on a particular person, the NSA can use this to figure out personal traits, details, or preferences about the person who is targeted.
The Intercept also reported that while the NSA is one controlling ICREACH, it sometimes allow equivalent agencies from the UK to snoop around. Furthermore, the NSA was also planning to open the doors for intelligent agencies in Australia, Canada and New Zealand; even the CIA was on the list of possible parties to share this information with.
Several legal experts were mortified when they heard about the scale of ICREACH and what it is capable of. The search engine is like a one-stop shop for personal information on thousands of persons, who knows what the NSA and its partners were really doing with all this metadata clogged up in one place for easy access.
Details about ICREACH were provided to The Intercept by the one and only Edward Snowden, who is now in Russia.
