Confirmed: NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide
December 4th, 2013In summary, my thesis was that the NSA operation that Tice was involved with was related to tracking individual Americans, on the ground, in real time, using the mobile phone networks…I’m pretty sure that it knows more about all of us than we can imagine.
I refuse to accept that this only targets foreigners and that collection on Americans is incidental. Washington Post goes to an NSA source for this absurd reassurance. Give it another few weeks or months for the lunatic conspiracy theorists to be proved right yet again.
Via: Washington Post:
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.
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 the people using them.
