NSA Collecting Hundreds of Millions of Contact Lists from Personal E-mail & IM Accounts, Including Americans

The government may be shut down, but the NSA is not …

Nothing is off limits to the NSA and so much for anything personal privacy. According to the NSA and their collection techniques, we are guilty until proven innocent. According to the WAPO, “Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.” But don’t worry, President Barack Obama previously stated that the NSA’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens.” Of course this is the same individual who says that the Obamacare website is a success, it is just “glitchy”.

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 to 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 a year.

From The Hill … Maybe some one might want to define and quantify what “required to minimize the ‘acquisition, use and dissemination’ of contacts of U.S. citizens” is!

Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the program is aimed at “valid foreign intelligence targets,” including terrorists, drug smugglers and human traffickers. He added that the NSA is required to minimize the “acquisition, use and dissemination” of contacts of U.S. citizens.

But of course because of media bias, we hear really nothing of this invasion of privacy. However, as the Lonely Conservative states, image if a Republican was in the White House?