Millions of Cell Phone Locations Logged Daily by the NSA

The Washington Post is reporting that the NSA use cell phones to track the movements of millions of people daily. The NSA claims that they do this to aid their anti-terror surveillance. The report goes on to say:

The huge database built up by the NSA (National Security Agency) keeps an eye on “hundreds of millions” of mobile phones,  it let the agency map movements and relationships in ways that were “previously unimaginable”.

It added that the vast programme potentially surpassed any other NSA project in terms of its impact on privacy. Information about the programme was in papers released to the Post by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The spying agency is said to have accumulated so much data, about 27 terabytes according to leaked papers seen by the Post, that it was “outpacing” the NSA’s ability to analyse the information in a timely fashion.

The analysis, via a computer system called Co-Traveler, was necessary as only a tiny fraction of 1% of the data gathered was actually useful in its anti-terror work, said the paper. The analysis is so detailed that it can be used to thwart attempts to hide from scrutiny by people who use disposable phones or only use a handset briefly before switching it off.

The American Civil Liberties Union believes that such ‘dragnet surveillance’ should not be conducted without public debate. They say on their website:

“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. 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.”

We have known for a long time that the phoney war on terror was set up for ulterior motives. We live in a country where our government is frightened of its own shadow and that paranoia is being forced onto the citizens of this country.

Of course there are those that would do us harm as a nation, there always has been, and there always will be. If certain individuals need to be watched and tracked for national security purposes so be it, but tracking millions of citizens going about their regular business is not only costly, but as the report shows, provides the NSA with more data than it can process.

This is counter-productive as somewhere in that mass of unprocessed data might be the information on the one individual that could be planning to act on his or her destruction of the United States fantasy. If, or when, a genuine terror attack occurs, it could well be the NSA that is to blame because they weren’t doing the right thing at the right time.