According to new National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the United States have been using database systems to store information on over 5 billion cellphone location data on a daily basis, an amount growing so exceedingly large the NSA has been moving to a greater processing system since May 2012 in order to digest all the data, The Washington Post reported.
The top-secret documents given to The Post by Snowden, along with interviews with U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed the agency's ability to easily track and store the location and movements of cellphone users in and out of the country, allowing officials to "map their relationships."
After the records and data are fed into a database which stores locations of "hundreds of millions of devices," the data is then analyzed by new projects which were solely created to provide a sort of "mass surveillance tool," according to The Post.
The NSA claims the data being stored and processed is not done so to target Americans' purposefully, but it does so anyway. The agency also states the information gathered is "incidentally" done so, the Post reported. U.S. intelligence officials stand by their claim they programs being used are lawful and only used to find known or wanted targets.
The process by which the information is being gathered have long been a debate between privacy advocates and national security officials, according to The Post. The NSA programs allow a mapping of relationships and locations over time and are deemed sensitive to a person's privacy.
Cellphone location data is one of the few technologies that can not be turned off, or blocked, because cell phones give off their location even when they are not being used, or off, according to The Post. This makes it an unwilling, and unidentifiable, way of gathering information on cellphone users.
A senior collection manager at NSA spoke to The Post anonymously, but with permission from the NSA, and said they receive "vast volumes" of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones," according to The Post, adding that "data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year."
The reason an enormous amount of data must be gathered is because NSA does not know which part, or amount, of the data will be needed at any given moment, so it collects all the data possible, to later go in and analyze what they see fit, The Post reported.
"There is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States," Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told The Post.
The only people not expressing concerns with the invasion of privacy such programs create are the NSA and intelligence officials, themselves. Lawmakers, on the other hand, have expressed tremendous concerns with the amount of data being collected from the billions of cellphone users in the United States, according to The Post.
Democratic senators Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.) are some of those lawmakers who plan to introduce an amendment to the defense spending bill for 2014 that may require U.S. intelligence agencies to notify the public of any data they have ever collected, or have plans on collecting in the future for "a large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity."
According to an NSA spokesperson, the agency has gathered so much information it is impossible to offer that sort of insight.
"It's awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers," one intelligence official said in a telephone interview with The Post.
Though the NSA and intelligence officials have claimed the sole purpose of such data collection is to target foreign opposition, a document dated October 2012 shows the discussion on the challenges of tracking cell phone users who are part of two different mobile networks, like T-Mobile and Verizon, The Post reported.
Another facilitator for such data collection is that many of these carriers databases can be accessed by any entity, according to Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, The Post reported.
"Many shared databases, such as those used for roaming, are available in their complete form to any carrier who requires access to any part of it," Blaze told The Post. "This 'flat' trust model means that a surprisingly large number of entities have access to data about customers that they never actually do business with, and an intelligence agency - hostile or friendly - can get 'one-stop shopping' to an expansive range of subscriber data just by compromising a few carriers."
During the phone interview, The Post asked a U.S. intelligence official about said document, but he refused to comment, only saying it was a "poorly chosen" example of the data collection and does not show the program's true foreign focus, but the agency cannot deny their access to these carriers networks are extremely vast, as shown by the documents leaked by Snowden, which can be viewed interactively here.
