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
By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani
The Washington Post
October 14, 2013
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.
[...]
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