– Data flows around the world and the rapid growth of digital information are attracting the attention of both the private sector and public services. Processing these streams is becoming a promising endeavor. How much data do you and I produce? According to recent research by IBM, humanity generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of information every day. If these bytes were visualized as flattened pennies, they would cover the entire globe in five layers. Data collection by security services relies on the basic thesis that the entire mass of data can be analyzed in such a way that it can be used to identify connections between different people. By analyzing these connections, leads can be found for investigative purposes. The main principle in data processing is to supply each fragment with a label. Based on this metadata, computer algorithms will be able to identify connections of interest to the security service. Metadata is data that describes other data. This is, for example, the names and sizes of files on your computer. In the digital world, a label affixed to a piece of data would be called a tag. Providing data with a label is a mandatory first step in data processing, because it is the label that allows the analyst or his program to classify and organize the available information for further processing and analysis. Tags allow you to manipulate data fragments without having to go into their content. This is a very important legal point in the work of the Security Service, because the US law does not allow to open the correspondence of US citizens, as well as foreigners staying in the country legally, without an appropriate warrant. Therefore, the NSA uses a special, highly sophisticated program that "tags" all collected information. These are the basis for any system that links different types of data: video files, documents, phone records. For example, a data processing system can draw the attention of investigators to a suspect who posts terrorist propaganda online, visits websites that describe the technology of making improvised explosive devices, and buys, for example, a pressure cooker. One such program is called Accumulo. It is used for surveillance in international communication systems, and it was created precisely to tag billions of disparate data fragments. It's the security service's "secret weapon." The NSA has the right to perlustrate international communication channels and collects huge amounts of data. These are trillions of fragments of various messages that people write all over the world. The agency does not hunt for criminals, terrorists or spies that are identified through its work, but simply leaks the information obtained to other government services – the Pentagon, the FBI and the CIA. The work then proceeds according to this scheme. First, one of the 11 judges of the secret FISA court accepts a request from a government agency for permission to reprocess certain data obtained by the NSA. Upon receiving authorization, the request is first forwarded to the FBI's Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit – ECSU. This move is to ensure legal correctness – FBI agents verify the request and confirm that the targets of the surveillance are not U.S. citizens. ECSU forwards the same request to the FBI's Data Interception Techniques Unit. They receive the information from the Internet servers and pass it on to the NSA to run it through their data processing programs. Many communications companies deny that their servers are open to NSA access. Federal officials, on the other hand, report evidence of such cooperation. Finally, the NSA passes the relevant information to the government agency from which the request was made.
