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New Snowden Leak: of 160000 Intercepted Messages, Only 10% From Official Targets

Posted by samzenpus on from the that-old-familiar-story dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with the latest news about NSA spying from documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. 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."

4 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's worse? by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 3, Informative

    Which one is the former and which the latter? Because intercepting messages sounds like it is mighty unconstitutional.

  2. Re:What's worse? by Charliemopps · · Score: 3, Informative

    You're right, I got them mixed up. :-p
    You get my point though.

  3. Re:How big is the problem really? by jeIIomizer · · Score: 5, Informative

    We are talking about 0.003% which seems "somewhat reasonnable"

    That's not even close to reasonable. It's an egregious violation of the constitution and people's fundamental liberties.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  4. "Fireworks Show" still to come by joelholdsworth · · Score: 3, Informative

    Note that this is not yet Greenwald's "Fireworks show" - his promised grand finale was delayed from 4th July. From what I've gleaned, there will be a big-bang scoop naming specific names of US citizens - major public and political figures - who were wiretapped by the NSA. USG has claimed there will be some harm done, so the story has been delayed while the journalist team investigate.

    Stay tuned. I can't wait.