WASHINGTON, October 15 (RIA Novosti) – The United States is collecting hundreds of millions of contact lists from the email and instant messaging accounts of Internet users across the globe, according to documents disclosed by fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) harvests the information from Internet-based companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo, vacuuming up troves of “buddy lists” and email address books as the data passes through networks throughout the world with the stated goal of tracking potential terrorists, human traffickers and other serious criminals, the Post reported.
The report is the latest in a series of revelations based on documents leaked by Snowden, a former NSA contractor who has received temporary asylum in Russia, about the US government’s vast surveillance of electronic communications that critics say constitutes illegal intrusion into individuals’ private lives.
Unlike the NSA’s collection of domestic phone records and information on web users from US Internet firms, its harvesting of contact lists is not conducted with authorization from the US Congress or the US Patriot Act, the Post reported.
Because the data is accessed from locations overseas, the program does not require such authorization, according to the report.
“None of those [access points] are on US territory,” the Post quoted an official speaking on condition of anonymity as saying.
Senior intelligence officials cited by the Post said collecting such information from American citizens would be illegal if the program was conducted from US-based facilities.
According to an NSA document on the program leaked by Snowden, the agency during a single day last year collected nearly 450,000 email address books from Yahoo, 105,000 from Hotmail, nearly 83,000 from Facebook, more than 33,500 from Gmail and nearly 23,000 from other providers not named in the report, the Post reported.
Extrapolating from those figures, the NSA program is capable of collecting more than 250 million such address books annually, the newspaper reported.
Spokespeople for Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo told the Post that they were unaware that this information was being collected from their users’ accounts.
An unidentified senior US intelligence official was quoted by the newspaper as saying that US citizens’ privacy is protected in the collection process because “we have checks and balances built into our tools.”
Snowden was granted one-year asylum by Russia in August after he arrived in Moscow on a flight from Hong Kong. He fled the United States, where he is wanted on espionage charges, after disclosing reams of classified NSA documents to the media.
Many civil rights activists in the United States and around the world have described Snowden as a whistleblowing hero. US officials however have described his actions as extremely damaging and say media outlets have mischaracterized some of the information in the leaked documents.
