CHENNAI, August 1;Continuing its series of exposes on the manner in which the U.S Government has been tracking global electronic communication traffic, The Guardian newspaper has published new documents that reveal details on an international programme that siphons data directly from Internet networks without judicial oversight or authorisation.
Code-named XKeyscore, the programme, the U.S National Security Agency claims, is the “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the Internet. In one 30-day period in 2012, around 41 billion records were retrieved and stored in XKeyscore.
The surveillance programme also appears to have a significant Indian connection. One page from the training manual released, titled “Where is XKeyscore?”, points out that the programme has over 700 servers from 150 sites—India being one of the sites in question.
Other countries that appear to be directly implicated include China, Myanmar, Philippines and Japan.
While there is no further information on the purposes and exact locations of these servers, it would appear from the slides released that New Delhi, India is a site that relays information back to the XKeyscore web Server that, in turn, relays information to various NSA analysts. This could not, however, be independently verified by The Hindu.
