This Latest Snowden Revelation Will Make Your Head Spin: The NSA Steals Your Email Contact List

Businessinsider

The Washington Post has unearthed a new controversial tactic from the  National Security Agency — harvesting data from the online address books of American citizens.

Citing classified documents given to the Post by former NSA contractor turned leaker Edward Snowden, the paper reports that the organization intercepts email contact lists to piece together connections and map the digital relationships of millions, including unsuspecting Americans, in the name of finding potential terror connections.

From the Post report:

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 per year.

Two unnamed intelligence officials cited by the Post did not dispute that the number of Americans swept up in the program could total as many as tens of millions.

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