Pinwale
Open-knowledge reference entry
Pinwale is the code name for a National Security Agency (NSA) collection and retrieval system for so-called "Digital Network Intelligence", including internet e-mail. It is searchable by monitored NSA analysts.
The existence of the system was first revealed by an NSA analyst who was trained in its use during 2005. However, according to Homeland Security Today, Pinwale contains information much more than email. It also contains other forms of Internet data, and other forms of digital communications as well. Its software has built-in protections against collecting from any of the Five Eyes members. Unlike its successor XKeyscore, targets for Pinwale have to be approved beforehand by the FISC.
According to information obtained by The Guardian from Edward Snowden, Pinwale is part of a "multi-tiered system" to address the issue of NSA "collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time." The system allows analysts to store "interesting" content in databases such as Pinwale, which is capable of storing material for up to five years.
Pinwale consists of at least two known partitions referred to as "Sweet" and "Sour".
According to the documents leaked by Snowden, Pinwale normally processed about 60 GB data per day without trouble. However, Pinwale was overwhelmed when Yahoo started mass mailbox transfers between its data centers, which were captured by the NSA's MUSCULAR program that taps the private clouds of Google and Yahoo.
“Pinwale” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pinwale, Open-knowledge and entry can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7196571. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pinwale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.