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In reply to the discussion: How the NSA is still harvesting your online data - 1 stream alone processed one trillion records [View all]KoKo
(84,711 posts)I was just getting ready to post this and hit reload and you already had close to the same thing! What the heck could those names mean? CREEPY...like some kind of mad scheme from a bad spy novel.
Here was my post:
EvilOlive, ShellTrumpet, MoonLightPath, Spinneret, Deep Dive--WTF?
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It continued: "After the EvilOlive deployment, traffic has literally doubled."
The scale of the NSA's metadata collection is highlighted by references in the documents to another NSA program, codenamed ShellTrumpet.
On December 31, 2012, an SSO official wrote that ShellTrumpet had just "processed its One Trillionth metadata record".
It is not clear how much of this collection concerns foreigners' online records and how much concerns those of Americans. Also unclear is the claimed legal authority for this collection.
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Another SSO entry, dated February 6, 2013, described ongoing plans to expand metadata collection. A joint surveillance collection operation with an unnamed partner agency yielded a new program "to query metadata" that was "turned on in the Fall 2012". Two others, called MoonLightPath and Spinneret, "are planned to be added by September 2013."
An SSO entry dated September 21, 2012, announced that "Transient Thurible, a new Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) managed XKeyScore (XKS) Deep Dive was declared operational." The entry states that GCHQ "modified" an existing program so the NSA could "benefit" from what GCHQ harvested.
"Transient Thurible metadata [has been] flowing into NSA repositories since 13 August 2012," the entry states.