Pinwale is the code name for a

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) collection and retrieval system for so-called "Digital Network Intelligence", including internet e-mail., pag
1
at archive. It is searchable by monitored NSA analysts. The existence of the system was first revealed by an NSA analyst who was trained in its use during 2005. However, according to ''Homeland Security Today'', Pinwale contains information much more than email. It also contains other forms of Internet data, and other forms of digital communications as well. Its software has built-in protections against collecting from any of the

Five Eyes The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in sig ...

members. Unlike its successor

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 ...

, targets for Pinwale have to be approved beforehand by the

FISC Under the Merovingians and Carolingians, the fisc (from Latin ''fiscus,'' whence we derive "fiscal") applied to the royal demesne which paid taxes, entirely in kind, from which the royal household was meant to be supported, though it rarely was. ...

. According to information obtained by ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...

'' from

Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and su ...

, Pinwale is part of a "multi-tiered system" to address the issue of NSA "collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time." The system allows analysts to store "interesting" content in databases such as Pinwale, which is capable of storing material for up to five years. Pinwale consists of at least two known partitions referred to as "Sweet" and "Sour". According to the documents leaked by Snowden, Pinwale normally processed about 60 GB data per day without trouble. However, Pinwale was overwhelmed when Yahoo started mass mailbox transfers between its data centers, which were captured by the NSA's

MUSCULAR Skeletal muscles (commonly referred to as muscles) are organs of the vertebrate muscular system and typically are attached by tendons to bones of a skeleton. The muscle cells of skeletal muscles are much longer than in the other types of muscle ...

program that taps the

private cloud Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multi ...

s of Google and Yahoo. Monitored email accounts being hacked by spammers also present a challenge to Pinwale, because they can cause the database of suspect email addresses to grow exponentially with information of no intelligence value.

References

{{National Security Agency Government databases in the United States National Security Agency operations Privacy of telecommunications Privacy in the United States

See also

References