The National Security Agency created a Google-like search database for different forms of communications of both Americans and foreign nationals, according to classified documents published today by The Intercept.
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The documents reveal that the search engine feature could comb over 850 billion records detailing data about phone calls, emails and online chats. These records were searchable by different domestic law enforcement agencies, like the FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency.
The information is the first to concretely suggest that the NSA provided other agencies with the trove of metadata it was collecting in a massive surveillance program that first came to Americans' attention last summer with documents leaked by former NSA employee, Edward Snowden.
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The search engine is called "ICREACH," according to the documents (you can view them on The Intercept), which point to the service being available for several years at least.
"The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community," according to one memo from 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."
One of the reports notes that as many as 1,000 law enforcement agents had access to NSA's bounty of metadata. While the metadata pointed out factors like who made a phone call, who received it and the duration of the call, it doesn't directly reveal the content of the call.
