| Chicago Sun-Times | - |
WASHINGTON
- The National Security Agency has been sifting through millions of
contact lists from personal email and instant messaging accounts around
the world - including those of Americans - in its effort to find
possible links to terrorism or other ...
NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally
Video:
In June, President Obama said the NSA’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens.”
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.
Read the documents
The NSA's problem? Too much data.
Read select pages from an NSA briefing on problems
with high-volume, low-value collection of e-mail address books and buddy
lists.
SCISSORS: How the NSA collects less
An NSA presentation on the SCISSORS tool that helps the agency cut out data it does not need.
An excerpt from the NSA's Wikipedia
An article from "Intellipedia," the NSA's classified wiki, on the problem of overcollection of data from Internet contact lists.
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.
The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.
Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”
The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the acquisition, use and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
The NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S. call records, under a separate program, has generated significant controversy since it was revealed in June. The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying, “You need the haystack to find the needle.”
Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.
I think it's important to note that it isn't just the U.S. intelligence agencies that do this. Also, most countries on earth as well as many companies on earth as well as many individuals on earth for both known and unknown reasons. So, to limit this to just the NSA is ridiculous too. And it is also important to realize people have been hired to watch people always back thousands of years and to report literally everything about them back thousands of years already too. The only difference here is that it is machines doing the watching and reading.
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