NSA COLLECTED 200 MILLION TEXT MESSAGES EVERY DAY, CALLED IT A ‘GOLDMINE’

[geeteam]

Following revelations earlier this week that the National Security Agency has accessed some 100,000 computers using secret radio waves, the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News report that U.S. spies have indiscriminately collected nearly 200 million text messages a day from people around the world.

The text message gathering operation is part of a program codenamed “Dishfire,” according to top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden. A document from UK spy agency GCHQ reveals that the NSA program collects “pretty much everything it can,” which includes metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” text communications sent by people in the UK.

Despite these descriptions, an NSA spokeswoman told the Guardian that characterizing Dishfire as “arbitrary and unconstrained is false,” and that the spy agency only used its powers of data collection against “valid foreign intelligence targets.” The spokeswoman added that “privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire.”

Rather than sifting through the contents of SMS text messages, NSA and GCHQ used a data analysis program known internally as “Prefer,” which could pull out information including missed call alerts or text sent by someone using international roaming, to bolster the agency’s intelligence about targets’ communication circles and travel locations. The documents, dated 2011, describe these bits of metadata as “gems,” and describes text messages overall as a “goldmine” for the agency.

As the Guardian writes, this is the intelligence the NSA collected from text messages each day, on average:

• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)


• Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts


• More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.


• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users


• News of the dragnet text message collection comes just one day before President Obama is expected to announce his plans to curtail perceived overreach by the NSA. According to Bloomberg, the NSA’s controversial phone metadata collection program will remain mostly intact, though some changes are expected.

News of the dragnet text message collection comes just one day before President Obama is expected to announce his plans to curtail perceived overreach by the NSA. According to Bloomberg, the NSA’s controversial phone metadata collection program will remain mostly intact, though some changes are expected.

Source

[mastershake]

obama didnt do crap. he is allowing everything to continue as is. he is a freakin jerk, liar, and just an all around moron.

[OrbingStorm]

There are higher ppl than Obama doing this.....he will placade the population without doing anything legitimately I believe.Hopefully Im wrong.

[geeteam]

It might be...

[anuseems]

Channel 4 and the Guardian newspaper report that NSA spies collect and store around 200 million messages per day for the purposes of extracting metadata including location data, credit card information and contacts.

The Guardian reports that the documents also reveal that British spies were given access to the collected metadata, but not the actual content, of text messages sent to and from British citizens.

According to GCHQ documents the program, codenamed Dishfire, collects pretty much everything it can as opposed to merely collecting communications data from current surveillance targets.

The secret program has been in operation from at least May 2008 and, by April 2011, was intercepting 194 million text messages per day. While that number may sound huge, it is only a drop in the ocean when you consider that Paul Lee, head of telecoms research at Deloitte, predicts that 50 billion such messages will be sent every day across the globe in 2014.

A leaked top secret presentation, dubbed "Content Extraction Enhancements For Target Analytics. SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit", gives us some idea as to the type of information being collected around the world each day.

For example, Dishfire collected data on over 6 million changes of SIM card, 5,314 instances of travel plans and over 800,000 financial transactions, including bank activity, credit card payments made to individuals and phone to phone money transfers. Dishfire even recorded the geocoordinates for 76,000 sent messages.

Documents shown in the Guardian report suggest that US phone numbers are removed from the database in accordance with US law but others, including those based in the UK, are retained.

To read the content of a message GCHQ requires a warrant, but it is allowed to search for "events" data relating to UK numbers - that is, who is contacting who and when it is happening.

It can also go back and access historical messages sent by and to a valid target, before the target was known to the authorities, once a warrant has been obtained. The Guardian quotes a GCHQ memo:

In contrast to [most] GCHQ equivalents, DISHFIRE contains a large volume of unselected SMS traffic. This makes it particularly useful for the development of new targets, since it is possible to examine the content of messages sent months or even years before the target was known to be of interest.

A separate GCHQ memo highlights the breadth of Dishfire by asking security analysts to limit their searching to 1,800 phone numbers at a time.

There was no immediate reaction to these revelations from the NSA but a GCHQ statement said:

All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with the strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate and that there is rigorous oversight.

Speaking to Channel 4 news Stephen Deadman, group privacy officer and head of legal for security, privacy and content standards at Vodafone group, commented:

What you're describing sounds concerning to us because the regime that we are required to comply with is very clear and we will only disclose information to governments where we are legally compelled to do so, won't go beyond the law and comply with due process.

We're going to be contacting the Government and are going to be challenging them on this. From our perspective, the law is there to protect our customers and it doesn't sound as if that is what is necessarily happening.

The former Interception Commissioner, Sir Swinton Thomas, said that the practice was a worry, before going on to tell Channel 4 news:

Certainly in my time I would take the view that it's not open to our intelligence services to obtain or certainly to use communications or data which would not have been lawful in this country.

It's not dissimilar to the question: Do you use material which you may have reason to believe has been obtained by torture? It's a different area of course, but the concept is very similar.

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/01/17/nsa-sweeps-up-hundreds-of-millions-of-text-messages-daily/

Edited January 18, 2014 by anuseems