Section 215 bulk telephone records and the MAINWAY database
(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