NSA Now Mining Contact Lists: 500k Email Addresses A DAY

(Probably Yours and Your Mom’s, Too)

It isn’t just Edward Snowden backing up the claims behind the latest National Security Administration (NSA) leak (although he did provide a copy of the PowerPoint). Snowden, along with top intelligence officials who spoke with The Washington Post upon the condition of anonymity have confirmed that Big Brother is now hungrily inhaling the contact books out of email accounts and messenger ‘buddy lists’ from all over the globe — to the tune of some 500,000 email addresses every single day.

Remember when President Obama said the NSA’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens” back in June?

Uh huh.

Take it away, Washington Post:

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.

[…]

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 a year.

This, of course, includes everybody. Because of the way the data is being collected, there is no possible way for the NSA to make a U.S. Constitution-upholding version of their program. But what about the FISA court?

The way the NSA gets around the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is by using foreign telecommunications companies and not collecting any of this data on U.S. soil (or that of its territories). Since we all know the Internet is not bound by geographical lines, and many of the major providers like Google, Facebook and Yahoo among others have data centers located all over the globe, stealing the data in a way that still semantically adheres to FISA regulations shouldn’t really be all that tough to do.

In addition, the data is sucked up in a sort of ‘drive-by’ operation — when it’s being transmitted through Internet switches — instead of when its sitting idle on company servers, so the companies involved aren’t asked permission or even informed when it happens.

In terms of data, this is worse than that time we found out the NSA was bulk collecting our domestic phone call records. Why? Because a lot of our contact books contain much more information than a simple email address. We’re talking names, street addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, photographs (that will be super useful for populating biometric facial recognition databases), and depending on what service you might use, text from email or chat messages, etc.

It’s a lot of data to glean every single day. At that rate, the NSA is mining over 250 million email addresses a year.

Gee, no wonder the agency had to use taxpayer funds to build a $2 billion data hub in the Utah desert. Although its capacity is classified, apparently the hub deals in exabytes and zettabytes. “An exabyte being equivalent to 100,000 times the size of printed material held by the Library of Congress, while a zettabyte is 1,000 times that amount,” according to RT.

Even Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein admitted the committee is “far less aware” of the operations NSA is conducting under Executive Order 12333, the U.S. intelligence activities order. Regardless of how sad that is, in short, Congress never approved this level of data mining on the world, including American citizens.

Don’t worry though. A senior U.S. intelligence official told WAPO that Americans’ privacy is protected because “we have checks and balances built into our tools.”

Uh huh.

Melissa Melton is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple and a co-creator of Truthstream Media. Wake the flock up!