The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.
(Video: How the NSA uses cellphone tracking to find and ‘develop’ targets)
The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.
One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.
In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them.
Via: Washington Post
Continue Reading.....
Showing posts with label Cellphones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cellphones. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
President Joe Biden is hiding a myriad of information on the more than 75,000 Afghans his administration has brought to the United States ...
-
A pro-amnesty group is forecasting that up to 1.76 million young illegal immigrants would get work permits under President Barack Obama’...
-
Throughout the online battles over Kim Davis, the counterfactual I’m most presented with is along the lines of the following: “You wouldn’...
-
While President Obama works to deliver on his longtime promise to close the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba his Defense Secre...
-
Farhang Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Isfahan and a former Senior Rese...
-
A majority of Californians are opposed to “sanctuary city” policies in which local jurisdictions ignore federal immigration detainer reque...
-
California Gov. Jerry Brown wants over three billion dollars in new taxes, including a $65 tax on every vehicle, plus increases in gasolin...
-
Donald Trump’s net favorable rating among Republicans increased significantly over the past two weeks, putting him among the top six Republ...
-
Forcing you to bake a gay wedding cake is just the start. The gay marriage fascists are pretty resourceful when it comes to using the po...
-
As Hillary Clinton's campaign seeks to project dominance in a field that could soon include Vice President Joe Biden, her top advisers...