In an elaborate scheme, the NSA maps out all types of communication

Sep 30, 2013 06:47 GMT  ·  By

Social media sites have a lot of information on everyone, depending on what you choose to share and the NSA is taking advantage of that.

According to a recent New York Times article, based on files from the Snowden stash, the agency has been exploiting personal information drawn from its large collection of metadata to create a complex graph of social connections for intelligence purposes.

The practice has been going on for a long time, but it only targeted foreigners. In November 2010, however, NSA officials lifted restrictions and gave agents the green light to apply the same work to domestic data as well.

The shift in policies meant to help the agency “discover and track” connections between foreign targets and US citizens, according to a memorandum from January 2011.

The list of sources used by the agency includes Facebook profiles, insurance information, bank codes, passenger manifests, GPS location information, property records, voter registration rolls and tax data, basically creating a complex profile on anyone of their targets and their contacts.

The graph looks extremely sophisticated and it can provide agents with direct and indirect contact chains between US citizens and individuals or organizations overseas that the NSA has its eyes set on.

This is yet another proof that the NSA has been collecting data on Americans, something that they’ve denied doing for a long time now, claiming that all of NSA’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose.

Even the FISA court justified such a violation of the privacy of US citizens by referring to a Supreme Court decision from 1979 which said Americans can have no expectation of privacy in regards to the people they contact.

And while the agency keeps saying that it only collects metadata, as an alternative to actual conversations, this type of data can actually reveal a lot of details about a person, as law professors and IT specialists have mentioned over the past few months.

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The NSA takes advantage of social media
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