14 DAY TRIAL // A newly leaked document indicates the NSA was not only harvesting millions of emails, but it was also collecting contact lists from personal email and instant messaging accounts around the world.
Once more, the agency wasn’t targeting only foreigners, but also Americans, the Washington Post reports.
This new program was used to intercept email address books and “buddy lists” from IM services as they moved across global data links. This was achieved when online services transmit contacts when a user logs on, writes a message or syncs a computer or mobile device with info stored on various remote servers.
Unsurprisingly, the NSA wasn’t being picky when collecting such data, but rather took everything up in one swoop. The data was then analyzed to search for hidden connections and map relationships.
To get the real size of this operation, the Post provides some numbers. In one day, the NSA’s Special Source Operation collected 444,743 email address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from others. Quick math indicates there are over 250 million collected each year.
Many of the contacts belonging to Americans are collected from overseas. Of course, the agency won’t apologize for the situation. The NSA actually told the Post, they are “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.”
Taking into account all types of data collection the NSA engaged in, the data would enable the intelligence agency to draw a detailed map of a person’s life, including with the help of all the metadata that’s also being gathered.
The situation might worsen for the NSA with the current leak as the Congress or any intelligence court did not give the agency permission to collect contact lists in bulk.