Confirmed: The NSA spies on you
It is a well-known fact that security agencies around the globe are most at home working their magic in dark alleys, behind the scenes, in anonymity, in secrecy, among shadows and the National Security Agency could not be any different. They have been so successful in their dark arts of collecting information that they scoop millions of personal information per day, and save it for eons fueled by their deep-seated efforts to profile each and every living soul on this side of the solar system.
Unbelievably the NSA collects half a million buddy lists and in-boxes A DAY!!! Edward Snowden, the CIA Whistle blower currently living in Russia alleges that the NSA harvests around 250 contact lists per year.
Edward Snowden who was last week awarded the Sam Adams prize for integrity in intelligence in Moscow. The award is issued by a group of former intelligence and US law enforcement officials who have become critics of government surveillance programs.
The Washington Post reported that, “During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year“.
It goes further to state that:
“The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.
Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”
On the Other hand Julian Assange, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks, had this to say about secret surveillance programs conducted by the United States of America.
“Every time the press embarrasses the security establishment, shows they have been acting unlawfully, against what they have said to Congress or to the media, they trot out this old canard, that some speculative harm sometime in the future might happen, when we’re discussing harm that is happening right now, as a result of these abusive programs,”
Adding that:
“It’s a threat to U.S. democracy and to democracy more broadly in the West to have a surveillance apparatus on every single person that would have been the dream of East Germany,” Assange said.
“What type of place is Western democracy going to be? Is it going to be a place with a collapsing rule of law, with mass surveillance of entire populations?” he asked. “The West is becoming a place where the best and the brightest, who keep the government, hold the government to account, are ending up in asylum or in exile in other countries. We’ve seen that before with dictatorships in Latin America, with the Soviet Union, and it’s time it stops.”
On a different note Yahoo which is one of the biggest targets of NSA due to its lack of encryption of it’s users’ connections said on Monday that it will start encrypting these connections using SSL technology in January, according to the Post.
This will be doing too little too late by the one of the web leading giants as by now the NSA may already have collected most if not all of its users’ email and other personal details, without forgeting that the NSA has already – at least partially compromised SSL in some way, but the encryption will provide a safeguard that shall curtail the NSA’s spying activities.
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