The NSA is alleging tracking the locations of millions of phone

Thanks for another one, Ed

The National Security Agency is tracking more than just our Google searches, text messages and phone call metadata, according to a new report.

The NSA also tracks the location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones around the world, according to the Washington Post.

In all the agency collects and stores five billion call records a day, the Post reported.

This latest leak comes from "top-secret documents and interviews with US intelligence officials" provided by leaker Edward Snowden, and it has disturbing implications.

Hide your kids, hide your phones, they're tracking everybody out here

The location data that the NSA is allegedly collecting every day allows it "to track the movements of individuals - and map their relationships - in ways that would have been previously unimaginable," the Post wrote.

Apparently phone users' location data is not considered to be protected by the Fourth Amendment because it's "metadata" that's collected "incidentally."

And officials reportedly claim that the bulk of location tracking occurs outside the US.

US officials said that the location data collection programs the NSA uses are within the organization's legal rights, and that they're "intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets."

A bigger boat

But the NSA is collecting so much location data that it's reportedly spent the last year and a half upgrading its systems to provide greater storage capacity (its database is rumored to be around 17 terabytes already).

The Agency apparently needs to collect data on a planetary scale for its algorithms to be able to accurately track targets' relationships.

The report claimed the data is collected with the help of corporations around the world that are referred to in internal NSA documents by awesome codenames like "ARTIFICE" and "WOLFPOINT."

Did the Washington Post just leak the plot of the next Bond movie, or are things really this bad?

• The NSA said earlier this year that it analyzes only a teeny bit of daily global internet traffic

Source : http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/more-snowden-documents-reveal-the-nsa-s-alleged-phone-location-tracking-1204913

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