The National Security Agency collects nearly 200 million text messages from cellphones around the world — each and every day, it was reported Thursday.
The intelligence agency runs a program code-named “Dishfire” to extract data on the location, contact networks and credit-card details of mobile users.
Dishfire collects “pretty much everything it can,” according to a joint report from Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which first published Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, and Britain’s Channel 4 News.
The NSA operates a second program, called “Prefer,” that collects and analyzes automated text messages such as missed-call alerts or texts sent to inform users about international roaming charges.
Edward Snowden leaks come revelations that the NSA is mining info from global text messages.AFP/Getty
The global sweep also allows the NSA to work out phone users’ credit-card numbers using texts from banks.
The NSA and British allies defended the programs as legal and part of the successful anti-terror efforts that have averted a repeat of the 9/11 attacks.
Details of Dishfire were disclosed in documents, including a June 2011 report titled “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit,” by Britain’s GCHQ spy agency.
The GCHQ document said that in April 2011, the NSA collected an average of 194 million text messages a day.
As a result, the NSA could examine network roaming alerts and obtain details of 1.6 million border crossings a day.
The agency also collected more than 5 million missed-call alerts. These were used in “contact-chaining analysis” — that is, “working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when,” the Guardian said.
When people texted “for route info” or “setting up meetings,” the NSA was able to determine “geolocation data” from more than 76,000 messages a day, it said.
The documents said GCHQ took advantage of the NSA database to search the metadata — , information about the text messages but not the actual contents — of British citizens.
The NSA issued a statement defending its practices: “As we have previously stated, the implication that NSA’s collection is arbitrary and unconstrained is false.
“NSA’s activities are focused and specifically deployed against — and only against — valid foreign intelligence targets in response to intelligence requirements,” it added. “Dishfire is a system that processes and stores lawfully collected SMS data.”
With Post Wires