Pinwale

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.

Unlike its successor XKeyscore, targets for Pinwale have to be approved beforehand by the FISC.

[1] 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."

[4] 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.