Upstream collection is a term used by the

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

(NSA) of the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

for intercepting telephone and Internet traffic from the

Internet backbone The Internet backbone may be defined by the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers of the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-ca ...

, meaning major Internet cables and switches, both domestic and foreign. Besides the Upstream collection, NSA also gathers information from Internet communications through arrangements with Internet companies under the program codenamed

PRISM Prism usually refers to: * Prism (optics), a transparent optical component with flat surfaces that refract light * Prism (geometry), a kind of polyhedron Prism may also refer to: Science and mathematics * Prism (geology), a type of sedimentary ...

. Both the Upstream programs and PRISM are part of the

Special Source Operations Special Source Operations (SSO) is a division in the US National Security Agency (NSA) which is responsible for all programs aimed at collecting data from major fiber-optic cables and switches, both inside the US and abroad, and also through corpor ...

(SSO) division, which is responsible for collection in cooperation with corporate partners.

Programs

One of the slides of a presentation about the

-program describes Upstream as "collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past" and says the Upstream collection is conducted under the following four major surveillance programs: * FAIRVIEW *

BLARNEY Blarney () is a suburban town within the administrative area of Cork City in Ireland. It is located approximately north-west of the city centre. It is the site of Blarney Castle, home of the legendary Blarney Stone. Blarney is part of the Dáil ...

* STORMBREW *

OAKSTAR OAKSTAR is a secret internet surveillance program of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. It was disclosed in 2013 as part of the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. OAKSTAR is an umbrella program involving survei ...

The FAIRVIEW, BLARNEY and STORMBREW programs are for collecting data at facilities in the United States, whereas OAKSTAR is an umbrella for eight different programs used for collection outside the US. Under all four programs, the collection takes place in cooperation with commercial telecommunication companies, both inside and outside the US.Top Level Telecommunications
Slides about NSA's Upstream collection
January 17, 2014 Upstream collection programs allow access to very high volumes of data. According to one anonymous official speaking to a Wall Street Journal reporter, first, a pre-selection is done by the telecommunication providers themselves, who select traffic (including the text of emails and the audio of telephone calls) that most likely contains foreign communications. Then the data is passed on to the NSA, where a second selection is made by briefly copying the traffic and filtering it by using so-called "strong selectors" like

phone number A telephone number is a sequence of digits assigned to a landline telephone subscriber station connected to a telephone line or to a wireless electronic telephony device, such as a radio telephone or a mobile telephone, or to other devices f ...

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

es of people and organizations in which NSA is interested.Siobhan Gorman and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
NSA Surveillance Programs Cover 75% of Internet Traffic Transiting U.S.
Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2013 However, William Binney, a former high-ranking NSA official who is now a whistleblower, publicly maintains that the NSA seeks to "collect it all" with minimal filtering. Internet data collected by Upstream programs can be processed and searched through the

XKEYSCORE XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intellige ...

indexing and analysing system.

Operational details

According to former and current US government officials, there are more than a dozen major US based Internet switching stations where this kind of filtering takes place, which is not only near the sites where the main undersea Internet cables enter the US. An actual example of a facility where NSA taps Internet backbone cables is

Room 641A Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its ...

in the San Francisco switching station of AT&T, which was revealed in 2006. One of the devices used to filter the Internet traffic is the Semantic Traffic Analyzer or STA 6400 made by Boeing subsidiary Narus. For collection of data from Internet cables and switches outside the United States, the NSA also has secret agreements with foreign Internet providers, especially in Europe and the Middle East. The costs for this cooperation made by these companies are paid by NSA under its Corporate Partner Access program, just like the expenses of the American telecommunication companies. The total costs for this program were estimated at 278 million US dollar for the fiscal year 2013. Upstream collection is conducted under four different legal authorizations: * EO 12333 *

Transit Transit may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Transit'' (1979 film), a 1979 Israeli film * ''Transit'' (2005 film), a film produced by MTV and Staying-Alive about four people in countries in the world * ''Transit'' (2006 film), a 2006 ...

FISA The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ("FISA" , ) is a United States federal law that establishes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and the collection of "foreign intelligence information" between "foreign pow ...

FAA The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the largest transportation agency of the U.S. government and regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the country as well as over surrounding international waters. Its powers include air traffic m ...

In a

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), also called the FISA Court, is a U.S. federal court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants ag ...

(FISC) order from October 3, 2011, it was said that the Upstream collection accounts for approximately 9% of the total number of 250 million Internet communications which NSA collects under the authority of section 702 FAA every year. During the first half of 2011, NSA acquired some 13.25 million Internet communications through Upstream collection. Although this is a relatively small amount, the order says Upstream collection is significant because it contains certain types of valuable foreign intelligence information, it still involves the collection of millions of Internet communications each year, and it is impossible for NSA to exclude domestic communications being collected due to technical difficulties.Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order
October 3, 2011, p. 29-32.

Legal claims

On March 10, 2015, the

American Civil Liberties Union The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...

sued the United States Department of Justice and the National Security Agency (NSA) against the NSA massive online surveillance, claiming that "the surveillance exceeds the scope of the authority that Congress provided in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (“FAA”) and violates the

First First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1). First or 1st may also refer to: *World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement Arts and media Music * 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...

and Fourth Amendments." The lawsuit was not heard, like other previous analogue complaints, and the first debate was postponed to October due to lack of standing. The decision was appealed by the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...

who leaded other eight organizations. As of February 14, 2020, the legal case wasn't yet concluded.

Related media

File:International Cables- Crop.jpg, Upstream: Map of International Cables File:Transit authority (3) -crop.jpg, Upstream: Transit Authority File:Transit authority map -Crop.jpg, Upstream: Map of Transit Authority File:Unique aspects-crop.jpg, Upstream: Unique Aspects File:Corporate Portfolio (3) -Crop.jpg, Upstream: Corporate Portfolio

References

{{National Security Agency

External links

Top Level Telecommunications: Slides about NSA's Upstream collection
National Security Agency Internet privacy Mass surveillance Espionage