Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Edward Snowden declassified another NSA surveillance program

NSA collects millions of online address books of users per year.

U.S. National Security Agency collects millions of contact lists of e-mail services , and instant messaging platforms people in America and around the world. It on Tuesday, October 15, reported the publication of The Washington Post with reference to another portion of the documents submitted by the former U.S. intelligence officer Edward Snowden.

Tracking program, which has not been previously disclosed, is the interception of e-mail addresses and "buddy lists" in the instant messaging service during transmission on global communication channels. Data collection began at the moment when a user authenticate to the instant messaging service or public e-mail, or synchronize their devices with the information stored on remote servers.

Instead of tracking specific users, the NSA collects data en masse in order to make it easier for users to define relationships with terrorist organizations.


According to the documents, the NSA collected daily about 550 thousand different address books of users. According to Snowden, one day last year, the Office collected data 444743 address books Yahoo, 105068 - Hotmail, 82857 - Facebook, 33697 - Gmail and another 22,881 from other sources. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Data collection was dependent on a secret agreement with foreign telecommunication companies or allied intelligence agencies. Contact lists are stored online, are for the NSA much more informative source of information than a single recording of calls. Address books typically include not only the names and email addresses, but also phone numbers, addresses, places of work and information on the members of the family. Lists of e-mail accounts stored in the cloud, sometimes even contain information such as, for example, the first few lines of the message.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com

No comments:

Post a Comment