The National Security Agency tracks the locations of nearly 5 billion cellphones every day overseas, including those belonging to Americans abroad, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The NSA inadvertently gathers the location records of “tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad” annually, along with the billions of other records it collects by tapping into worldwide mobile network cables, the newspaper said in a report on its website.
Such data means the NSA can track the movements of almost any cellphone around the world, and map the relationships of the cellphone user. The Post said a powerful computer program crunches the data of billions of unsuspecting people, building connections between them by where their phones go. That can reveal previously unknown terrorist suspects through their location and relationships.
The program is detailed in documents given to the newspaper by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden. The Post also quotes anonymous NSA officials explaining the program, saying they spoke with the permission of their agency.
Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, declined to comment on the report.
The DNI’s general counsel, Robert Litt, has said the NSA does not gather location data on U.S. cellphones inside the U.S. But NSA Director Keith Alexander has testified before Congress that his agency ran tests in 2010 and 2011 to see whether it was technically possible to gather such U.S. cell-site data. Alexander said that the information was never used for intelligence purposes and that the testing was reported to congressional intelligence committees.
But Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the time that Alexander could have explained more. “The intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret,” said Wyden, who is among a bipartisan group of lawmakers who have introduced legislation to trim NSA’s surveillance powers.
Alexander and other NSA officials have explained that when U.S. data is gathered “incidentally” overseas, it is “minimized,” meaning that when an NSA analysts realize they are dealing with a U.S. phone number, they limit what can be done with it and how long that data can be kept.
Rights activists say those measures fall short of protecting U.S. privacy.
“The scale of foreign surveillance has become so vast, the amount of information about Americans ‘incidentally’ captured may itself be approaching mass surveillance levels,’” said Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.
“The government should be targeting its surveillance at those suspected of wrongdoing, not assembling massive associational databases that by their very nature record the movements of a huge number of innocent people,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
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