The USA Today released a story that revealed a government-sponsored program, later known as MAINWAY, a U.S. surveillance program that collects database for the NSA.
The discovery can be traced back when investigation reporter Seymour Hersh and Wired magazine revealed the program involved the NSA setting up splitters to routing cores on many U.S. telecommunication companies' and internet traffic hubs. This attempt has enabled the NSA to redirect most U.S.-based telecommunications to itself.
This in turn enables the NSA to eavesdrop conversation and order police investigations on tens of thousands of Americans civilians without warrants.
According to a security consultant who worked on the MAINWAY, "What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records ... they're providing total access to all the data." A former senior intelligence official said, "This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in alphabetical order ... the NSA is getting real-time actionable intelligence."
What MAINWAY does, is to collect metadata of hundreds of billions of telephone calls from AT&T and Verizon. According to estimates, the database contains more than 1.9 trillion call records and their details (caller, receiver, date/time of call, length of call, etc.). The program was said to start about seven months before the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The U.S. also has MARINA which is seen as a MAINWAY program but dedicated to intercepting internet traffic. It's a toolset for intercepting internet metadata (DNI in NSA terminology) and store them for up to a year.
According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden:
George Bush's administration neither confirmed or denied about MAINWAY or MARINA's existence.
