NSA harvested e-mail addresses: report

October 15, 2013 07:39 pm | Updated December 04, 2021 11:38 pm IST - WASHINGTON

FILE - This Sept. 19, 2007, file photo, shows the National Security Agency building at Fort Meade, Md.  The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cailf., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Obama administration is defending the National Security Agency's need to collect such records, but critics are calling it a huge over-reach. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

FILE - This Sept. 19, 2007, file photo, shows the National Security Agency building at Fort Meade, Md. The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cailf., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Obama administration is defending the National Security Agency's need to collect such records, but critics are calling it a huge over-reach. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

Top-secret documents on U.S. government surveillance provided by whistleblower and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed this week that the agency has been harvesting millions of e-mail addresses from contact lists of users of sites such as Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo.

Documents that Mr. Snowden shared with The Washington Post and remarks from unnamed intelligence officials were said to show that 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.

Reports referenced an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation which suggested that the figures represented a “typical daily intake… [and] correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year”.

The latest exposé comes in the wake of assurances given by U.S. President Barack Obama in June that the NSA’s e-mail collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens”. In its report this week, The Post however quoted two senior U.S. intelligence officials who acknowledged that though the collection of e-mail address lists took place overseas, “it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans”, possible numbering in the “millions or tens of millions”.

Shawn Turner, Spokesman for the Directorate of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, reportedly said the Agency was “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans”.

However, the PowerPoint presentation shared by Mr. Snowden suggested that the contact lists stored online supplied the NSA with “far richer sources of data than call records alone”, and this data included telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information, in addition to basic names and e-mail addresses.

The Agency’s surveillance programmes are in theory operated under the rules prescribed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. However neither the FISA Court not the U.S. Congress was said to have authorised this particular data collection activity, and according to officials the programme may even be “illegal” under U.S. law.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.