NSA collects nearly 5 billion cellphone location records per day
Washington Post report (based on Snowden leaks) reveals a possible 27 TB database.
Today, The Washington Post added another noteworthy finding
to the growing pile of information leaked by former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden: the NSA is collecting nearly five billion cellphone
location records per day from across the world. The Post reports
that this initiative allows the NSA to track individuals and map
relationships "in ways that would have been previously unimaginable."
This gigantic data collection feeds a database that stores information on "hundreds of millions of devices," according to the documents obtained by The Post. One estimate puts the size of this at 27 terabytes, which the paper frames as twice as large as the text content in the Library of Congress's print collection. It's so big that a 2012 NSA internal briefing recognizes the data is "outpacing our ability to ingest, process, and store."
And while the NSA doesn't focus this initiative specifically on Americans, the massive amount of information means plenty of that does pertain to US phones "incidentally," which The Post translates as a "foreseeable" but not "deliberate" result. The paper spoke with an intelligence lawyer who continued to emphasize that this program focuses beyond the US, which seems to prevent the data from falling under the Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizures).
To physically collect all this data, the NSA uses 10 “sigads,” or signals intelligence activity designators. The Post describes one sigad to demonstrate the setup (they also have a graphical breakdown of the NSA collection process):
The new report is only the latest in a months-long parade of
revelations infuriating privacy advocates. But given how difficult it
can be for citizens to avoid cellphone location surveillance (Chris Soghoian,
principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the
paper “the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our
modern communication system and live in a cave”), it may be the most
startling NSA leak to date.
“It is staggering that a location-tracking program on this scale could be implemented without any public debate, particularly given the substantial number of Americans having their movements recorded by the government," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, in a written statement. "The paths that we travel every day can reveal an extraordinary amount about our political, professional, and intimate relationships. The dragnet surveillance of hundreds of millions of cell phones flouts our international obligation to respect the privacy of foreigners and Americans alike. The government should be targeting its surveillance at those suspected of wrongdoing, not assembling massive associational databases that by their very nature record the movements of a huge number of innocent people.”
This gigantic data collection feeds a database that stores information on "hundreds of millions of devices," according to the documents obtained by The Post. One estimate puts the size of this at 27 terabytes, which the paper frames as twice as large as the text content in the Library of Congress's print collection. It's so big that a 2012 NSA internal briefing recognizes the data is "outpacing our ability to ingest, process, and store."
And while the NSA doesn't focus this initiative specifically on Americans, the massive amount of information means plenty of that does pertain to US phones "incidentally," which The Post translates as a "foreseeable" but not "deliberate" result. The paper spoke with an intelligence lawyer who continued to emphasize that this program focuses beyond the US, which seems to prevent the data from falling under the Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizures).
A sigad known as STORMBREW, for example, relies on two unnamed corporate partners described only as ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT. According to an NSA site inventory, the companies administer the NSA’s “physical systems,” or interception equipment, and “NSA asks nicely for tasking/updates.”
STORMBREW collects data from 27 telephone links known as OPC/DPC pairs, which refer to originating and destination points and which typically transfer traffic from one provider’s internal network to another’s. That data include cell tower identifiers, which can be used to locate a phone’s location.
“It is staggering that a location-tracking program on this scale could be implemented without any public debate, particularly given the substantial number of Americans having their movements recorded by the government," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, in a written statement. "The paths that we travel every day can reveal an extraordinary amount about our political, professional, and intimate relationships. The dragnet surveillance of hundreds of millions of cell phones flouts our international obligation to respect the privacy of foreigners and Americans alike. The government should be targeting its surveillance at those suspected of wrongdoing, not assembling massive associational databases that by their very nature record the movements of a huge number of innocent people.”
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