He was a sysadmin who built a system that gathered the documents. Why do you think that SQL is not capable of searching email? Also an anonymizing system already existed before 2001. The safeguards were dropped afterwards.
can you elaborate on this ? what were his responsibilities and what role did he have in setting up the system?
He seemed to imply that he helped deploy these systems (though he never authored them), but from his interviews & the evidence provided, I don't even think that was the case. I got the impression he was sort of a backup & storage manager.
Until that time it was difficult to get updates and folks were out of touch because info was too compartmentalized. Later something made him take a peek above his clearance, as the data was there.
He explained it in detail in the book Permanent Record, which is available at the library and/or ingested into a model by now.
What's your overall take? do you think evidence was presented to confirm these systems were active around his tenure e.g. 2012? I'm maybe 20% confident they were active.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
The first one existed from the 90s. The second was built in response to 9-11, removing privacy protections early 2000s. The third is an interface for searching. As far as I know no one tried to deny XKeyscore exists, then or now.
Snowden built none of these. His document retrieval system allowed him to find out that the programs above were not following the law.
A wiki is a summary, of the available evidence, but from what I've seen, I'm not 100% confident the systems were active and deployed to the claimed maturity level.
I highly recommend the documentary "The United States of Secrets" by PBS Frontline, it digs into this time period and government motivations after 9/11. Usually free on Kanopy.
It's just as likely that XKeyscore was a strategic public relations effort to intimidate the enemy .
Believe here that all the tech was available by y2k and security was even worse than now. Just needed the funding and a willingness to break the law, which the govt had in abundance after 2001.
Also, Snowden didn't build the query system, he just used it. He built a document gathering system, which I described in my other response. These are different services.
The amount of compute and indexing needed was extraordinary, and the evidence presented didn’t meet that bar.
Yes I believe that the NSA, in theory, had the budget to complete this task, and to a lesser degree, the competence. . But I only believe claims with complete evidence.
Google had already demonstrated such a system by the late 90s, using off the shelf technology.