The NSA daily tracks the cellphones of 5 billion users across the globe, including Americans traveling overseas, a new report says.
The agency uses the mass of information to map the locations of billions of people while sweeping up the cellphone data of millions of Americans in the process, according to The Washington Post.
The existence of the tracking program was contained in documents provided by leaker Edward Snowden. It was corroborated by US officials.
The agency’s massive trove of data occupies 27 terabytes of computer-server space, more than double what the Library of Congress’ print collection would occupy, the paper reported.
The capabilities are so vast that the agency is able to render most efforts at communication security effectively futile, the paper said.
The info feeds a vast database that stores facts about the locations of hundreds of millions of devices.
An internal NSA document said the volumes of data were outpacing the agency’s ability to process and store it.
US officials said the programs are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets.
The NSA says it does not target Americans’ location data by design, but acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally.”