Ordinary people ‘caught in NSA net’
Ninety percent of people identified in a tranche of communications intercepted by the NSA were ordinary internet users, not foreign surveillance targets, analysis by a US paper says.
Much highly personal information was retained by the NSA, the paper saysNinety percent of people identified in a tranche of communications intercepted by the NSA were ordinary internet users, not foreign surveillance targets, analysis by a US paper says.
The Washington Post says innocents were “caught in a net the National Security Agency had cast for somebody else”.
Much of the highly personal information was retained, the paper says, even though it had no intelligence value.
The information was provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The paper said it reviewed some 160,000 emails and instant-messages and 7,900 documents from some 11,000 online accounts, gathered by the NSA between 2009 and 2012.
The Post said that a four-month investigation it carried out revealed that nine out of 10 of the account holders – including many Americans – were not the intended surveillance targets.
Much of the information has, the paper says, a “startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality” telling stories of “love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes”.
Big brother is watching…shades of 1984.We are no longer a free Nation.Hoover would have been so happy!
Mike