The NSA’s ICREACH program scaled to 850 billion shared communications events

Evidence

In 2006 General Keith Alexander outlined his vision for a search tool called ICREACH that “would allow unprecedented volumes of… metadata to be shared and analyzed across the many agencies in the Intelligence Community.” By late 2007, the program was piloted, boosting the number of communications events it shared from 50 billion to more than 850 billion. The system was designed with a “Google-like” search interface that enabled analysts to run searches against meta-data “selectors” and to extract vital behavioral surplus for analyses that could reveal “social networks,” “patterns of life,” and “habits,” and in general “predict future behavior.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 377

Categorization

• DEFINE: ICREACH concretely illustrates what it means operationally to extract ‘behavioral surplus’ at national scale, giving the chapter’s core concept a real referent.