Boundless Informant

Boundless Informant (stylized as BOUNDLESSINFORMANT) is a big data analysis and data visualization tool used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). It gives NSA managers summaries of the NSA's worldwide data collection activities by counting metadata. The existence of this tool was disclosed by documents leaked by Edward Snowden, who worked at the NSA for the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Those disclosed documents were in a direct contradiction to the NSA's assurance to United States Congress that it does not collect any type of data on millions of Americans.

Intelligence gathered by the United States government inside the United States or specifically targeting US citizens is legally required to be gathered in compliance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court).

NSA global data mining projects have existed for decades, but recent programs of intelligence gathering and analysis that include data gathered from inside the United States such as PRISM were enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under President Obama in December 2012.

Boundless Informant was first publicly revealed on June 8, 2013, after classified documents about the program were leaked to The Guardian. This report contained a Top Secret heat map produced by the Boundless Informant program summarizing data records from 504 separate DNR and DNI collection sources or SIGADs. In the map, countries that are under surveillance are assigned a color from green to red.

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