The National Security Agency can track the location of millions of cellphones around the world, and collects 5 billion pieces of cellphone data from outside the U.S. daily, including from cellphones belonging to Americans abroad, according to a Washington Post report.
The newspaper says the NSA also “inadvertently” gathers some U.S. location records when it taps into worldwide mobile networks.
The program is detailed in documents given to the Post by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, who is currently avoiding U.S. prosecution in Russia.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the report.
The Post report says that because the NSA doesn’t know what cellphone data might be needed, the agency stores as much as it can. That amounts to 27 terabytes of data, or as the Post describes it “more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’s print collection.”
One internal NSA briefing shows that so much data is collected that the NSA has trouble processing and storing it in a timely manner. The NSA taps into the data by surveilling shared networks that cellphone companies use, according to the report.
From america.aljazeera.com
