While companies like Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Autonomy unit struggle to sell CIOs on the virtues of using a single platform to search all of their data silos, a new report suggests the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is already exploiting the technology to its fullest, much to the dismay of privacy advocates everywhere.

Documents handed over to The Intercept by whistleblower Edward Snowden appear to reveal the existence of a search engine that the spy agency launched in 2007 – long before Big Data became a buzzword – to make it easier for analysts to sift through the vast amounts of information the NSA collects. Dubbed ICREACH, the tool supposedly takes after Google’s famously simple interface and allows users to query specific data points associated with a specific person, such an e-mail address or a phone number, and receive a page of all communications made through the specified channel.

The engine doubles as a sharing platform, according to the report, providing access to more than 850 billion records on persons of interest in the U.S. and abroad. The documents indicate that users include the CIA, FBI and a number of other agencies as well as their  counterparts in the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance: the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

One of the leaked documents, a memo sent out to NSA insiders in 2010, says that ICREACH serves over 1,000 analysts across at least 23 organizations. A presentation from 2007 adds that each agency leverages its own data broker to connect to the platform, which effectively serves as a centralized hub for putting together complete profiles of suspect individuals. That includes their past activities, location, network of associates and any future behavior that may be predicted based on the historical information at hand.

The latest Snowden revelation provides a unique glimpse into the inner workings of the NSA’s global surveillance program, which is as technically impressive as it is controversial. And there’s always the possibility that the metadata search technology behind ICREACH may find its way into the Apache Software Foundation in the same way the same that Accumulo, the open-source data store developed to meet the agency’s unique security requirements, did before it. Unlike the Tailored Access Operations team’s automated mass hacking software, the platform could be repurposed for positive applications in the commercial world, where finding needles in the unstructured data haystack is only becoming a bigger challenge as organizations ingest more information.

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