How did he track mobile phones?
A new report by the Washington Post reports that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was "fishing" cookies from online advertisements that tracked users on the internet to identify its targets..
“As businesses monitor the mobility of users on the internet to find their target audience for their listings, a new door opens. That of surveillance by secret services,” the newspaper notes.
The NSA therefore uses the ad tracking cookies that result from online registrations to glean their targets.
These cookies provide information about the region in which the user lives, their language and whether they use the parental control filter.
Mobile monitoring
Meanwhile, the NSA collects approximately five billion mobile phone records daily, with the aim of gathering information about the location of device users, according to a Washington Post report.
According to the Washington Post, the data is used to verify the location of specific individuals and record their acquaintances/connections, as part of the NSA's counterterrorism activity.
This new revelation continues the “storm” of the Snowden scandal, with electronic surveillance. According to the Post, the database that the NSA has set up allows it to monitor “at least hundreds of millions of cell phones,” giving it the ability to monitor movements and interpersonal relationships on an unprecedented level.
Using this “tool,” the US National Security Agency can track where someone moves (from trips to other places to visits to homes) or even trace their past movements.
An NSA official (who spoke to the Post with the agency's permission) said the agency receives "massive volumes" of location data from around the world, monitoring cellular network connections worldwide — which serve both American and foreign networks.
As the report notes, the program surpasses any other NSA project in terms of privacy implications. The volume of data appears to be so large that it exceeds the agency's ability to analyze it in a timely manner.
Most of this information appears to come from mobile phone network surveillance, which includes location data. Analyzing this allows the NSA to see which devices are regularly in close proximity to each other, thus inferring that there may be some kind of connection between their owners. The set of tools used for this work – called Co-Traveler – allows the NSA to search for and identify potential accomplices of surveillance targets.
Eight Internet giants call for a "brake" on the NSA
Eight leading technology companies are joining forces and forming a common front against surveillance by US intelligence agencies, calling for wide-ranging reforms.
The eight companies are Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Yahoo and their "alliance" is called the Reform Government Surveillance group.
The "eight" even sent a letter to US President Barack Obama and Congress, in which they emphasize that current surveillance practices undermine civil liberties.
Many of the companies claim that the Snowden revelations have undermined public trust in the Internet, and blame intelligence agencies for the threat this poses to their business interests.
The eight companies are presenting a plan to regulate the operating framework and government surveillance, and are asking the US government to lead a global effort to implement it.
This is the biggest effort ever made by these companies (many of which are competitors) to present a "united front" on the issue.
The technology industry is a major powerhouse in Washington, as its founders and CEOs are sought after as sponsors and supporters in the US political arena.
Source: planet-greece.blogspot.com
