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(Updated: July 20, 2017) In the previous posting we saw that the domestic telephone records, which NSA collected under authority of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (internally referred to as BR-FISA), were stored in the centralized contact chaining system MAINWAY, which also contains all kinds of metadata collected overseas. Here we will take a step-by-step look at what NSA analysts do with these data in order to find yet unknown conspirators of foreign terrorist organisations. It becomes clear that the initial contact chaining is followed by various analysis methods, and that the domestic metadata are largely integrated with the foreign ones, something NSA never talked about and which only very few observers noticed. What is described here is the situation until the end of 2015. The current practice under the USA FREEDOM Act differs in various ways. The information in this article is almost completely derived from documents declassified by the US government, but these have vari...

(Updated: November 23, 2016) One of the most controversial NSA programs was the bulk collection of domestic telepone records (metadata) under authority of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The Snowden revelations provided hardly any information about this program, but many details became available from documents that were declassified by the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Because in these declassified documents all codenames are redacted, it was largely a mystery which NSA systems were used to store and analyse these metadata. By combining many separate pieces from both the Snowden-documents, as well as those declassified by the government, it now has become clear that NSA put the domestic phone records in its central contact chaining system MAINWAY, which also contains all sorts of metadata collected overseas. Reconstruction of the MAINWAY dataflow (Click to enlarge) MAINWAY versus MARINA Initially it was thought that MAINWAY was a repository just for telephone metad...