The National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting “hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans of millions,” the Washington Post reported on Monday.
The new revelations about vast NSA surveillance are the latest in a series made possible by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The contact lists collected represent “a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts,” and are scooped up with the help of foreign telecomms and foreign intelligence agencies.
The Post reports:
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The higher number of Yahoo users’ data may be because it, “unlike other service providers, has left connections to its users unencrypted by default,” a practice the company told the Post on Monday it would stop.
Techdirt points out that it’s not just the email addresses that would be collected in this program:
This previously undisclosed program is able to skirt the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act because the data is collected overseas. Even if an American is not overseas, his or her data might be because “Large technology companies, including Google and Facebook, maintain data centers around the world to balance loads on their servers and work around outages,” the paper explains.
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