The U.S. National Security Agency has been using phone and email records to build visual graphs of Americans' social connections, according to a new report from the New York Times. These new graphs are meant to identify the people Americans know, their specific locations at certain times, who they travel with and other personal information, the report said.
New documents obtained by the Times from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA started using email and phone logs to monitor Americans' social connections beginning in November 2010.
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The communications data collected by the NSA is then coupled with other sources of public data to build out the graphs. Documents show that in addition to phone and email records, the NSA is using "bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data."
The NSA focused on American social connections in an effort to identify relationships between Americans and foreign intelligence targets, according to the report. This type of surveillance was already in place for foreigners of interest to the U.S., but the realization that American citizens were under similar watch is the most shocking revelation from the report.
The documents did not specify which phone and email databases were used in generating the graphs, the Times reported.
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