cross-referenced news and research resources about
NSA's MAINWAY surveillance database
MAINWAY is a database maintained by the United States' National Security Agency (NSA) containing metadata for hundreds of billions of telephone calls made through the four largest telephone carriers in the United States: AT&T, SBC, BellSouth (all three now called AT&T), and Verizon.
The existence of this database and the NSA program that compiled it was unknown to the general public until USA Today broke the story on May 10, 2006. It is estimated that the database contains over 1.9 trillion call-detail records. According to Bloomberg News, the effort began approximately seven months before the September 11, 2001 attacks. As of June 2013, the database stores metadata for at least five years.
The records include detailed call information (caller, receiver, date/time of call, length of call, etc.) for use in traffic analysis and social network analysis, but do not include audio information or transcripts of the content of the phone calls.
The database's existence has prompted fierce objections. It is often viewed as an illegal warrantless search and a violation of the pen register provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and (in some cases) the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
|
|
|
updated Fri. February 9, 2024
-
Seeking Alpha
October 5, 2017
Then I came upon NSA (the ticker matching the government security agency is what sparked my initial curiosity). Upon looking into it, I liked its different business structure. Since its IPO in 2015, the main way the company had grown is by buying up what it calls Private Regional Operators. These are mostlyÃâà...
The Intercept
December 7, 2016
By the first half of 2004, the National Security Agency was drowning in information. It had amassed 85 billion phone and ... with the help of such techniques. A March 2004 SIDtoday article said a chaining tool called MAINWAY helped a counterterrorism analyst uncover six new “terrorist-related numbers.”Ãâà...
Ars Technica (blog)
June 2, 2015
The phone records provided by AT&T (formerly the companies AT&T, SBC, and BellSouth) and Verizon have been pulled into Mainway, the NSA's five-year cache of phone metadata. This data can be mined by analysts with approval from one of a small number of NSA officials, according to the NSA's "factÃâà...
Al Jazeera America
May 29, 2014
The LinkedIn profile cited by Soghoian's initial tweet mentions classified NSA programs like Nucleon, Dishfire, Octave, Pinwale, Mainway, Banyan and Marina. These were mentioned alongside one program that was revealed in the press only a month later: Trafficthief, a database for storing metadata fromÃâà...
New York Times
September 29, 2013
WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' .... The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway.
New York Times
September 29, 2013
WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' .... The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway.
The Guardian
August 23, 2013
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect materialÃâà...
The Atlantic
August 14, 2013
That's the approach I take to national security and that's the spirit behind this look at the structure of one of the most important institutions in U.S. intelligence: the National Security Agency. Some intelligence organizations, such as the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial IntelligenceÃâà...
The Slatest
June 26, 2013
Protesters supporting Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), Protesters supporting ... The NSA stores the billions of phone records on a database called MAINWAY, the Washington Post reported, though intelligence officials say the agency chooses not to collect location data.
Foreign Policy (blog)
June 17, 2013
The revelations about the National Security Agency's spying programs just keep piling up. True to his ... The government has code-named this program MAINWAY. Here's how ... Stepping back, the NSA fact sheet explains that both PRISM and MAINWAY are "subject to strict controls and oversight." In theÃâà...
|
news and opinion
|
|
|
mainway
NSA databases:
mainway
|
|
