I read this article yesterday, and it blew me away.
This 3-page article goes on and on with a new release of what NSA has been doing.
It seems outlandish to spend so many resources on fear,
...yet they still MISSED the Boston Marathon bombing.
Shouldn't there be something like a signal-to-noise ratio or a risk/benefit analysis.
Washington Post
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani
10/14/13
NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally
Quote:
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.
<snip>
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.
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.
<snip>
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