Documents that were leaked to the Washington Post by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the spy agency has been able to obtain hundreds of millions of contact lists from email and instant messaging accounts as the data is transmitted over the Internet.
The newly revealed program is able to obtain the contact list from email and instant message services that transmit the lists when a user logs on. The program does not target individual users; instead it grabs mass amounts of the contacts and connects the dots to find relationships between foreign intelligence targets, according to the Washington Post.
The program has been harvesting the information of Americans despite a restriction that the NSA is only supposed to gather information on foreign targets. Since many of the biggest email providers and tech companies - Facebook, Google, Yahoo and others - have servers located in other countries so the data of Americans crosses international boundaries even when the user does not, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Since the data is pulled from data centers that are located overseas and is used to target non-American citizens the NSA does not need to obtain court approval for the program; this particular program only needs authority form the executive branch to exist, according to the Wall Street Journal.
"In general, the committee is far less aware of operations conducted under 12333," a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee told the Washington Post referring to the Executive Order that gives power to intelligence agencies. "I believe the NSA would answer questions if we asked them, and if we knew to ask them, but it would not routinely report these things, and, in general, they would not fall within the focus of the committee."
Since the NSA is taking the information as it is being transferred as opposed to hacking into a server holding the information they are not required to inform the email companies that they are taking the information, according to the Washington Post.
"(Microsoft) does not provide any government with direct or unfettered access to our customers' data," Microsoft spokeswoman Nicole Miller said. "We would have significant concerns if these allegations about government actions are true."
Information about surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, in particular the logging of phone records, has many Americans worrying about the amount of privacy they have left.
"Today's revelation further confirms that the NSA has relied on the pretense of 'foreign intelligence gathering' to sweep up an extraordinary amount of information about everyday Americans," Alex Abdo, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told USA Today. "The NSA's indiscriminate collection of information about innocent people can't be justified on security grounds, and it presents a serious threat to civil liberties."
