The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA built its own secret Google

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen US government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, e-mails, cellphone locations, and Internet chats.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing.