The NSA is becoming the real face book, as the spy agency scoops up millions of people’s pictures from the Internet to store in a facial-recognition database, according to documents released by Edward Snowden.
The agency is tapping e-mails, texts, social media, video conferences and other communications to glean images to use with software that can ID as many faces as possible, the leaker’s documents say.
The NSA is collecting “millions of images per day” worldwide as part of the four-year-old program — though only about 55,000 are clear enough to use, say the documents, obtained by The New York Times.
The agency hopes to use the pictures to track down terrorists — however, the technique has civil-liberties groups concerned it will violate the public’s privacy.
Based on federal privacy laws, the images captured were likely of people overseas, the Times said.