NSA Collects Millions Of Email Addresses, Buddy Lists Globally

We’re sure many Americans are very well aware of the NSA and their attempt to make the country safer by watching every little thing we do online as well as through many of our methods of communication, but according to a recently published report, the government agency doesn’t only want to know what you do specifically, but also wants to learn who you talk to as well.

The Washington Post published a report which was triggered by documents provided by Edward Snowden that shows the NSA collects the email address books and buddy lists of Internet users at an alarming rate. According to the report, in a single day, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch was able to collect a total of 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from other unspecified providers.

This isn’t just an issue for the American people as this information is being taken from global Internet users. The purpose, of course, is to help keep the world safe from acts of terrorism, but to collect information at such an elevated rate is a bit alarming, especially when the organization is doing so without any consent from the end user who may happen to live outside of U.S. borders.

Daniel Perez
Categories: Cellphones, Computers, Gadgets, Tablets, Web
Tags: nsa