US intelligence agency, NSA, as part of its mass surveillance programme, has reportedly collected around 200 million text messages per day from across the globe.
Top secret documents from the National Security Agency as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate use of messages by the agency to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details.
The documents also revealed that NSA’s UK counterpart GCHQ had used the data collected by NSA to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK, reported The Guardian.
According to GCHQ documents NSA under its surveillance programme codenamed as ‘Dishfire’ rather than just storing the communications of existing surveillance targets collected “pretty much everything it can”.
The NSA used its vast text message database to extract information related to people’s travel plans, contact networks, financial transactions and much more – even those of individuals who were under no suspicion of any kind of illegal activity.
In April 2011, it was found that around 194 million text messages were collected under Dishfire programme, while another additional programme, codenamed ‘Prefer’ was found collecting and using missed call alerts or text messages to extract information and conducting automated analysis on untargeted communications.
Data collected
According to the report on The Guardian NSA was able to extract, on a daily basis, over 5 million missed-call alerts; 1.6 million network roaming alerts; over 100K electronic business cards; over 800K financial transactions among other things.
Industry reaction
Vodafone, one of the leading mobile phone companies in the world with operations in 25 countries including Britain, has expressed extreme shock and surprise over the revelations and has announced that it would be challenging the UK government over the alleged programme.
Meanwhile US president Barack Obama, who is under extreme international pressure, will be giving his response to the report of his NSA review panel on Friday.
