The Australian secret service ASD has allegedly assisted the US National Security Agency NSA in collecting millions of email addresses.
With a new leak coming from Edward Snowden, the Washington Postreports that the NSA and ASD are gathering as much specific information as they can about how users interact with each other over the internet.
The NSA has already been reported to have collected metadata from millions of Internet users without their consent, but the latest document shows that US and Australian intelligence agencies have targeted email address lists and messenger contact lists.
The document states that the secret services collect all contact lists from Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and Facebook users and that all this data is stored in multiple databases.
A representative day, as presented in the document leaked by the Washington Post, shows that the data collected is 712,366 mailing lists. ASD was responsible for collecting 311,113 of these lists.
Address lists are not the only source of information mentioned in the document. The two intelligence agencies also appear to be targeting the contact lists of each messenger, with Yahoo Messenger being the focus. The document notes that the NSA collects information from 500,000 contact lists and inboxes on a daily basis, as reported by ZDNET.
However, the NSA and ASD have a difficulty with data management when they try to analyze it.
An example is the case of hacked Yahoo emails when they were used to send spam in 2011. ASD's information collection was dramatically enriched, as a lot of spam was collected, among the useful information. Of course, the most worrying thing is that even email accounts protected by two-factor authentication are not immune to the secret services.
Source: secnews.gr
