14 DAY TRIAL // New reports indicate that the National Security Agency is gathering about 5 billion records a day, recording the whereabouts of cellphones around the world.
The system that the NSA has set in place serves as a handy tool to track the movements of individuals, as well as a map of their relationships in the smallest details, the Washington Post reports.
This means that every day, at least hundreds of millions of devices get tracked down across the world as they bounce off cell phone towers, helping the agency triangulate their position through the extensive grid built in an effort to connect the world.
While the NSA doesn’t target the location of American citizens, a lot of data gets collected “incidentally,” a word often used to describe how US data gets grabbed up by the agency.
The intelligence agency apparently allowed a senior collection manager to speak out about this particular issue and admitted that they were getting vast volumes of location data from around the world by simply tapping into the cables that connected mobile networks globally.
This means that US cellphones or foreign ones are affected equally, while data from tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad gets collected every year, something that shouldn’t, in theory, happen.
US officials continue to say that this type of programs that collect and analyze location data are perfectly within the law and intended to develop intelligence about foreign targets.
The new data proves once again that the United States intelligence services simply likes to collect the entire haystack hoping to find at least something of interest, completely disregarding the privacy of those that are affected in the meantime.
The system developed by the agency allows it not only to collect data on a particular target, but also on all potential co-travelers, looking for unknown associates of certain individuals.
An ACLU technologist, Chris Soghoian, told the Washington Post that this type of data was particularly sensitive because, unlike other types of data, such as emails or online activities, it could not be encrypted or disguised.