Latest Snowden Revelation: NSA Gathers Billions of Records on Cellphone Locations Worldwide Every Day

The Washington
Post published a report this afternoon based on
information leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealing
that the NSA tracks the locations of “at least hundreds of millions
of devices” around the world, enabling the agency “to track the
movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways
that would have been previously unimaginable.”

From
The Washington Post:

The records feed a vast database that stores information about
the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices,
according to the officials and the documents, which were provided
by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to
analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with
what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but
the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the
whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term
that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of
anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting
vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping
into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that
serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data
is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who
travel abroad with their cellphones every year.

The news coming only a day after the editor of The
Guardian
said that the London-based newspaper has only published 1
percent of the files leaked by Snowden.

More from Reason.com on the NSA here.