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Thursday, December 05, 2013

NSA Collects 5 Billion Records A Day On Cellphones

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.

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.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

4 billion is my daughters. She text's constantly.

Anonymous said...

I guess that's why my iphone battery now dies in the middle of the day. Lasted all day until it automatically updated to a new "spy" operating system.

Anonymous said...

This story is funny Obama is on pmsnbc stating that the endangered dose not collect American data.

Anonymous said...

Seems a bit preposterous. (that figure)

Anonymous said...

11:30
How so?

Anonymous said...

6:55 I have noticed the same thing.