Overview of NSA Global Surveillance and Collection System
PRISM, MARINA, NUCLEON and MAINWAY, plus STELLARWIND and ECHELON
Information and excerpts from Wikipedia and other sources
PRISM Collection Dataflow
Two preceeding global surveillance programs and the four that replaced them
(The five links below are to Wikipedia articles)
- ECHELON – Satellite and microwave communications collection system, the predecessor to the current system. Its existence was revealed by Nicky Hager through an article in Covert Action Quarterly, winter 1996-97 issue.
- STELLARWIND – Set of intelligence programs authorized by George W. Bush, superseded by four new programs:
- PRISM – Internet content (access of data "held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history")
- MARINA – Internet metadata (siphoned from data links owned by AT&T, Sprint and MCI/Verizon
- NUCLEON – Telephone content (interception of spoken words)
- MAINWAY – Telephone metadata (call records from Verizon, AT&T, Bell South, etc.)
PRISM is a
MARINA is a
NUCLEON is a
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.
–From the USA Tody article by Cauley, Leslie (May 11, 2006), "NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls"