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STORMBREW is a secret internet surveillance program of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. It was disclosed in the summer of 2013 as part of the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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The FY 2013 budget for STORMBREW was $46.06 million.
Scope of the program
The program comprises cooperation with a "key corporate partner", which was identified on October 23, 2013 by the Washington Post—quoting NSA historian Matthew Aid—as Verizon. This was confirmed by a joint report by Pro Publica and The New York Times from August 15, 2015.
STORMBREW is an umbrella program involving surveillance of telecommunications. It falls under the category of "Upstream collection", meaning that data is pulled directly from fiber-optic cables and top-level communications infrastructure, which allows access to very high volumes of data. Most of the pre-selection is done by the providers themselves, before the data is passed on to the NSA.
A map shows that the collection is done entirely within the United States. This corporate partner has servers in Washington, California, Texas, Florida, and in or around New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
SIGADs
STORMBREW consists of the following SIGADs:
Note: SIGADs not otherwise designated are presumed to operate under the legal authority of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA)
Glossary