Continuing its series of exposes on the manner in which the U.S. government has been tracking global electronic communication traffic, The Guardian has published new documents that reveal details of an international surveillance program that has at least some of its servers in India.
This program, code-named XKeyscore, siphons data directly from Internet networks without judicial oversight or authorisation.
The U.S. National Security Agency claims, through the documents revealed, that it 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 program also appears to have a significant Indian connection. One page from the training manual released, titled “Where is XKeyscore?” points out that the program 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, the slides released indicate that 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.
