Posted on 12/04/2013 1:00:33 PM PST by Nachum
The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts 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 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.
The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.
One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.
In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them.
U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets.
Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The list, Ping
Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list
But they cannot build a healthcare website.
/johnny
If they want to track overseas, I have a lot less problem with it.
Then they’d just put video cameras with facial recognition software in the booth.
Same difference.
IT security and application development are two very different disciplines. Most people in IT security don’t know as much as they say they do, and most people in application development don’t develop in languages they actually know. The converse to each of these is a rarity.
The Technocrats are running amok.
Computer technology has turned our government into rabid dogs.
NSA=THE BEAST. Just sayin’.
Then pretty soon all callers look suspiciously like Groucho Marx. >:^[
LOL. V masks would be popular indeedy.
I guess that means they’re tracking my iPad, since that goes with me everywhere I go ... :-) ...
Ah ... it’s “Back to the Future” ... eh? I can hardly find a phone booth anymore, when they used to be all over the place.
Drip, drip, drip.
This is all on the NSA for allowing such a low ranking contractor such as Snowden access to this much material, and not having any alarms going off when he downloaded so much data.
Known affectionately as
‘The Santa List’
You do take it out and use it once in a while. Every time you do they’ve got you.
I understand that, I use it to make sure no one is listening as it is so easy to have your phone in meetings.
You can be tracked by the cell towers ... and if you turn that off, you might as well throw away the phone, since you then couldn’t make or receive phone calls ... LOL ...
If you have a cell phone, you’re tracked no matter what you do. The only way to get around that is to throw away your cell phone.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.