An unidentified Russian special services employee said with "practically 100 percent certainty" that one of the servers supporting an NSA surveillance system is located in the American embassy in Moscow, Vedomosti reported Monday.
The existence of an XKeyscore server in Moscow was revealed on July 31, when the Guardian newspaper released a National Security Agency training presentation leaked by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
One slide reports that as of 2008, there were more than 700 XKeyscore servers at about 150 sites worldwide, each marked on a map that included a red dot clearly indicating Moscow.
The servers were conspicuously absent in countries such as Iran, which is of interest to American intelligence services but does not have an active U.S. embassy.
Some RuNet experts do not believe that there are NSA servers in Moscow, according to the Vedomosti report.
Equating the servers' traffic with those at the Google data centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Andrei Kolsenikov, director of the Coordination Center for Russian domain names, told the newspaper that they could not go unnoticed.
The NSA, the American embassy in Moscow and the Russian Federal Security Service all declined to comment to Vedomosti on XKeyscore.
The system allows NSA analysts to sift through an immense database of recent information, including e-mails, chats, browsing history, any files a user has sent or uploaded and an individual's current Internet activity.
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