The NSA has built ICREACH, a
Google-like search engine that secretly provides data — metadata of both
foreigners and citizens on US soil — to nearly two dozen U.S.
government agencies, including the DEA, FBI, and CIA, The Intercept reported.
Many of those surveilled data had not
been accused of any illegal activity as well. But until now, it is
unclear that exact what mechanism was used by the US intelligence agency
to share the massive amounts of surveillance data, as well as number of
government agencies it was sharing information with.
Although, the classified documents show that the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration were the “key participants”
in the ICREACH program, but it has been accessible to more than 1,000
analysts at 23 U.S. government agencies that perform intelligence work.
This is not the first time when the
ICREACH program has been made public, the Guardian journalist Glenn
Greenwald’s book named “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and
the U.S. Surveillance State” also contained a slide among its myriad
documents that highlighted the some of the metadata types that were
accessible through ICREACH:
According to The Intercept journalist
Ryan Gallagher, ICREACH search engine, masterminded by recently retired
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander, was launched by the NSA in 2007, but
was only made publicly available on Monday this week.
Knowing those 850 billion metadata
shared through ICREACH program, one can track people’s movements, map
out their networks of associates, predict future actions, and
potentially reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.
The NSA described the ICREACH program as a “one-stop shopping tool” for communications analysis,
which generates a portrait of communication patterns associated with a
particular piece of information, like a phone number or e-mail address
linked to a person.
ICREACH was designed to pull
information stored in multiple databases created by programs greenlit
under Executive Order 12333 — a President Reagan-issued order vastly
expanding the data-collection powers of the American intelligence
community from foreign communications networks, though the report claims
that the system also contains “millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing.”