SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
12/06/2013
Of the NSA surveillance programmes revealed to date, the geo-location project appears to represent the agency's largest in scale and scope. The NSA declined to comment on the report.
The data was scooped up by tapping into cables that link mobile phone networks - both American and foreign - across the globe, the Post said.
The location data was gathered with the help of 10 "sigads" or signal intelligence activity designators.
Because mobile phones broadcast their locations even when there is no call made or text sent, NSA analysts were able to use mathematical techniques to comb through location data and track patterns of movement over time for a given suspect, it said.
The analytic methods used by the agency to sift through location data were known as Co-traveler, the report said.
Even the use of disposable phones that users switch on and off to make only brief calls in the hopes of avoiding authorities trigger note in the system.
The NSA insisted it did not intentionally track the location data of Americans, but it ended up receiving details that showed the whereabouts of domestic mobile devices "incidentally," wrote the Post, which also quoted intelligence officials.
US officials told the Post that the programmes that collected geo-location data were legal and designed only to gather intelligence about foreign militants or other "targets" deemed a threat to the United States.
The volume of information flowing in from the program was "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store" data, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing leaked to the Post.
The scale of the programme will reinforce long-running concerns raised by civil liberties groups that the NSA's electronic spying poses a serious threat to privacy rights worldwide.
"It is staggering that a location-tracking programme on this scale could be implemented without any public debate, particularly given the substantial number of Americans having their movements recorded by the government," said Catherine Crump, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.