The NSA Collected Data From Random Citizens

More details have emerged about the NSA's shady surveillance program and they're increasingly alarming.

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More details have emerged about the NSA's shady surveillance program and they're increasingly alarming.

According to a Washington Post report, most of the documents collected by the agency came from people who were not necessarily its legal targets. Up to nine out of ten people whose personal data was collected were collateral damage of sorts, their data having been tracked because of their connections to the actual target.

Here's how the paper describes it: "Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. "Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

Yikes.

[via The Verge]

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