NSA collects 5 billion cell phone locations daily, tracking movements and relationships
The National Security Agency is gathering approximately 5 billion records a day on the location of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals, and map their relationships, in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
The Washington Post reports how the records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.
NSA analysts can look at the data and track an individual’s movements throughout the world. They can then map out the person’s relationships with others and expose previously unknown correspondence.
The agency collects the large amount of cell phone data in order to find out who is interacting with targets the agency is already tracking, even though most of the records collected are not relevant to national security.
The number of Americans who are tracked as part of the data collection overseas is unclear from the Snowden documents, and a senior intelligence official told the Post it is “awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers.”
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