Roland San Juan
Sunday, December 8, 2013
How the NSA is tracking people right now
How the NSA is tracking people right now
Documents obtained by The Washington Post
indicate that the National Security Agency is
collecting billions of records a day to track the
location of mobile phone users around the world.
This bulk collection, performed under the NSA’s
international surveillance authority,
taps into the telephony links of major
telecommunications providers including some
here in the United States.
The NSA collects this location and travel habit
data to do “target development”
— to find unknown associates of
targets it already knows about.
To accomplish this, the NSA compiles
information on a vast database of devices and
their locations. Most of those collected, by
definition, are suspected of no wrongdoing.
Officials say they do not purposely collect U.S.
phone locations in bulk, but a large number
are swept up “incidentally.”
Using these vast location databases, the NSA
applies sophisticated analytics techniques to
identify what it calls
co-travelers
— unknown
associates who might be traveling with, or
meeting up with a known
target.
HERE IS HOW IT WORKS
Target
Co-traveler
Read related story
Target
Co-traveler
SOURCE: The National Security Agency, OpenSignal and MIT Media Lab . GRAPHIC: The Washington Post.
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