NSA collects 200M text messages a day
LONDON—Like a mystery movie-cum-spy thriller.
The disclosures have infuriated US allies, embarrassed Obama administration diplomats and shocked privacy campaigners and lawmakers.
“Will our government continue to spy on everyday Americans?” asked Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has collected almost 200 million mobile phone text messages a day from around the world in the latest revelations from the Edward Snowden files, a report said on Thursday.
The Guardian newspaper and Britain’s Channel 4 News reported that the NSA used the messages to extract data on the location, contact networks and credit card details of mobile users.
British spies were given access by the NSA to search the collected “metadata”—information about the text messages but not the actual contents and small fraction of calls—of British citizens, according to the report.
The secret files say the program, code named Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can,” the Guardian and Channel 4 News reported.
Dishfire works by collecting and analyzing automated text messages such as missed call alerts or texts sent to inform users about international roaming charges, the news organizations said.
It was also able to work out phone users’ credit card numbers using texts from banks.
They cited an internal NSA presentation from 2011 on the program and papers from Britain’s electronic eavesdropping facility, the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ.
There was no immediate reaction from the NSA.
GCHQ said it worked within British law.
“All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with the strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate and that there is rigorous oversight,” it said in a statement.
Not arbitrary
The NSA also said its collection of text messages was carried under strict limits under the law and was not arbitrary.
“Dishfire is a system that processes and stores lawfully collected SMS data,” the spy agency said in a statement.
“Because some SMS data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire,” it said, adding that any data on innocent foreign nationals was also removed promptly.
The report comes a day before US President Barack Obama is due to give a long-awaited speech proposing curbs on NSA phone and Internet data dragnets exposed by fugitive intelligence contractor Snowden.
President Obama presents Americans on Friday with long-awaited reforms of spy agency phone and Internet data collection sweeps, prompted by the damaging torrent of leaks unleashed by Snowden.
Caught between civil liberties campaigners and a resistant intelligence community, Obama is expected to roll out only modest changes to the massive “metadata” dragnets laid by the NSA.
Snowden, a fugitive US contractor now exiled in Russia where he has been granted temporary asylum, has fueled months of revelations by media organizations over data mining and spying on foreign leaders by the NSA in one of the biggest security breaches in US history.
The White House has assured Americans that data on phone calls and Internet use is only collected to build patterns of contacts between terror suspects and that US spies are not listening in.
Restoring confidence
But Obama has said that one of his goals in Friday’s speech at the US Justice Department is to restore public confidence in the clandestine community.
His appearance follows a prolonged period of soul-searching and policy reviews by the White House.
White House spokesperson Jay Carney said that Obama viewed Snowden’s disclosures as damaging but realized that reforms were necessary.
“The president has… acknowledged all along that the debates that those disclosures sparked were legitimate, that the questions that have been asked and the ideas that have been put forward about ways we may need to examine and perhaps reform our signal intelligence collection have all been worthwhile and legitimate,” Carney said.
The president discussed the details of Friday’s speech during a telephone call with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday, according to Cameron’s Downing Street office.
During the discussion, the two leaders “welcomed the unique intelligence sharing relationship between their two countries,” according to the statement. AFP
RELATED STORIES:
‘Internal error’ downs NSA website—official
NSA agent open to cutting a deal with Snowden
