In just one day in 2012, the NSA stole 444,743 contact lists from Yahoo, 82,857 from Facebook, and 33,697 from Gmail.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) is compiling hundreds of millions of lists of personal emails and instant messaging accounts around the world, including many Americans, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
The program steals users' email addresses and contact list addresses from instant messaging accounts as this data moves through various servers around the world, the report posted on the newspaper's website said, citing senior intelligence officials and documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former NSA consultant.
In just one day in 2012, the NSA stole 444,743 email contact lists from Yahoo! accounts, 82,857 from Facebook accounts, 33,697 from Gmail accounts, and 22,881 from other providers of such services—email, instant messaging, social networking, etc.—, according to an NSA document cited by the American newspaper.
The newspaper reports that analyzing this data allows the NSA to identify correlations between individuals as well as geographic correlations between foreign surveillance targets.
The data interception is taking place outside American territory, but it also includes the electronic contacts of many Americans, according to the report, which cites two senior American intelligence officials.
A spokesman for the US National Intelligence Directorate, which oversees the NSA's work, said the agency focuses on identifying and monitoring foreign espionage targets.
“We are not interested in the personal data of ordinary Americans,” he told the Post.
Snowden's revelations about the scope and methods of the NSA, including massive surveillance of Internet and telephone records, have unnerved U.S. allies from Germany to Brazil, with his supporters calling him a human rights advocate and his critics calling him a traitor.
The 30-year-old is currently in a secret location in Russia, beyond the jurisdiction of US authorities who are seeking him on espionage charges for leaking details of secret electronic surveillance programs to the media. He traveled to Hong Kong in May and later, under pressure from China, went to Moscow, where he was granted political asylum for a year.
Source: planet-greece.blogspot.com
