Disclosed in a heavily redacted review of the FBI's role in the prevention of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, its full capabilities are classified but at a minimum, provides a searchable archive of intercepted electronic communications, including email sent over the Internet.
[1] Another report suggests that online chat transcripts, email attachments, and audio of unspecified origin are stored.
In the following years it became a de facto depository of a wider category of intercepts, surpassing its original intent and straining its hardware limits.
It was upgraded in February 2009, improving the user interface and tools, and merged with a related system, EDMS.
[1] The underlying infrastructure of DWS-EDMS uses widely available commercial and open source technologies, including Java, Red Hat Linux, Oracle SQL, XML, Microsoft IIS, and Apache HTTP Server.