Yet despite these efforts, one of the servers is targeted by the NSA. It is in a large room devoted to computers and computer storage, just like every other room in this industrial park building on Am Tower Street just outside the city of Nuremberg. That the grey building is surrounded by barbed wire seems to indicate that the servers' provider is working hard to secure their customers' data. It is a small server that looks like any of the other dozens in the same row. Moreover, all members of this team are Tor users and appear to be have been targets of the mass surveillance described in the investigation. During the course of the investigation, it was further discovered that an additional computer system run by Jacob Appelbaum for his volunteer work with helping to run part of the Tor network was targeted by the NSA. Their research in this story is wholly independent from the Tor Project and does not reflect the views of the Tor Project in any way. Jacob Appelbaum is a paid employee of the Tor Project, Aaron Gibson is a paid contractor for the Tor Project, and Leif Ryge is a volunteer contributor to various Tor-related software projects. Three authors of this investigation have personal and professional ties to the Tor Project, an American company mentioned within the following investigation. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called 'the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of the Linux Community', and calls it an 'extremist forum'.

The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.

Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.

Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search.

Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by the NSA.

The investigation discloses the following:

Xkeyscore search data