The NSA Collects Contact Lists, Too
The NSA scoops up contacts from millions of email and instant messaging address books for personal accounts, according to the latest Washington Post report based off of a leak from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. According to the Post, some of those accounts are owned by Americans.
Here's how it works: every time a user synchs an address book with a remote server, or (depending on the service) logs into an account, the NSA can collect it. And they're doing so, in bulk, rather than by targeting individual users. The program relies on agreements with foreign internet providers — FISA makes such collection from American facilities illegal. But while the data mining of address books happens overseas, it includes account information belonging to Americans. Not only that, the Post notes, but the NSA "is not legally required or technically able to restrict its intake to contact lists belonging to specified foreign intelligence targets." So, how many contacts are we talking about here? This many:
That's via a PowerPoint slide obtained by the Post through Snowden — the Post speculates that the vast number of Yahoo collections, compared to the others, comes from the fact that Yahoo doesn't encrypt user connections automatically (the company is changing that next year). On top of the daily collection figures above, agency also collects 500,000 "buddy lists" from chat services on a typical day. That's so much data, apparently, that the sheer volume "has occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories." And yes, that's in part because of all the spam in the mix. The spam problem is so overwhelming that the agency is trying to figure out how to reduce its "over collection" of repetitive, useless spam contacts.
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Abby Ohlheiser 8:10 PM ET
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/10/nsa-collects-email-address-books-contact-lists/70535/