MARINA – Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society

Purpose:

MARINA is an NSA repository for metadata. It stores information about millions of Internet users for up to a year (GUA01). The repository contains contact information, browsing history and other metadata. It also has the ability to export data in a variety of formats, including charts that assist in pattern-of-life analysis (GUA01).

MARINA aggregates metadata from a variety of sources, including online social networks, billing records, bank transactions, insurance information, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls, GPS location information, property records, and unspecified tax data (NYT01).

MAINWAY is the counterpart programme for storing telephone metadata (MOJ01).

Capabilities:

Metadata storage and analysis
Pattern-of-life analysis

Data sources:

Internet traffic
Commercial and financial transactions
Travel records
Government records

Related programmes:

XKEYSCORE – NSA system for searching and analysing data from a wide range of sources.

PRISM – NSA programme for collecting content and metadata from service providers via the FBI.

TEMPORA – GCHQ programme for bulk data collection and buffering.

MAINWAY – NSA repository for telephone metadata.

Layers of operation:

Social layer: Aggregation of metadata from multiple sources, pattern-of-life analysis.

Background:

MARINA exploits a trend known as convergence, referred to in an NSA slide as “The gradual ‘blurring’ of telecommunications, computers, and the Internet” (ACU01).

This convergence of computerised data makes it easier to combine data from various sources, thus developing an understanding of both the social networks and the activities of people. MARINA is part of the Target Knowledge Database (TKB), a repository of data about targeted individuals including German Chancellor Angela Merkel (SPI01).