NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally

[Newsjock]

Source: Washington Post

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million per year.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-of-e-mail-address-books-globally/2013/10/14/8e58b5be-34f9-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html?hpid=z1

[warrenswil]

1. Disgusting but no surprise.

Not very much about this monster let loose by Bush/Cheney surprises us any more.
It’s disgusting.
We wrote about it when the Snowden leaks started turning into an avalanche in
NSA broke rules on privacy thousands of times
They wouldn’t know an illegal wiretap if it bit them on the a**.
They have to be reined in. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon is the only one trying.
If you haven't already done so, you should take whatever defensive measures you can.
In the (K)now

[bvar22]

2. Vice-President Joe Biden speaks out about NSA spying!

[obxhead]

3. That was before it was cool to spy.

Everything is different now. D's are in charge of it!

[NoodleyAppendage]

4. No way in hell that this passes any sort of Constitutional muster.

At what point do we decide enough-is-enough on this rampant pissing upon our (previously) Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms?

History will record Snowden as a hero (assuming that we don't continue to slide to fascism).

J

[leveymg]

5. That would explain why LinkedIn, Facebook, GMail all want access to my other email lists.

Some of these services regularly harvest that information from other email lists,and can be quite deceptive about how they get you to give it to them.

[dixiegrrrrl]

9. AND Gmail wants to know my phone number.

Lil pop up when I log on to Gmail.
Since I have now switched to opera mail, I give Gmail what it wants..
a nice batch of fictional answers.

[davidthegnome]

6. Notice... this news is becoming more quiet.

In the face of the government shutdown and the possible failure to raise the debt ceiling, most politicians, media - and most of us are focused on that. I've started to wonder if it's a smoke screen for something else. This National Security monster has gotten so out of control it's ridiculous. I imagine that there are several covert branches that even the President has no clue exist.

I believe in defending our borders and protecting our land... but more and more, it is seeming to me like there is an immense campaign to be able to determine what anyone is doing at any given time. Is that the end goal? I wonder..

[Zorro]

7. Just like Facebook

[Jesus Malverde]

8. Bump... nt

[Jesus Malverde]

10. Spam

Spam has proven to be a significant problem for NSA — clogging databases with data that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”

In fall 2011, according to an NSA presentation, the Yahoo account of an Iranian target was “hacked by an unknown actor,” who used it to send spam. The Iranian had “a number of Yahoo groups in his/her contact list, some with many hundreds or thousands of members.”

The cascading effects of repeated spam messages, compounded by the automatic addition of the Iranian’s contacts to other people’s address books, led to a massive spike in the volume of traffic collected by the Australian intelligence service on the NSA’s behalf.

After nine days of data-bombing, the Iranian’s contact book and contact books for several people within it were “emergency detasked.”

- See more at: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/10/14/remarkably-timed-spamouflage/#sthash.D9CUGLo0.dpuf