The NSA collects nearly 200 million text messages per day through a secret program called Dishfire, according to a new report in The Guardian. The agency described the collected messages as a "goldmine to exploit" for all kinds of personal data.
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the dragnet message collection program. The NSA uses these messages to extract the senders' and recipients' personal data such as location information, financial activity and contact details, according to the report published Thursday.
See also: Edward Snowden: Mission Accomplished, 'I Already Won'
An NSA slide describing Dishfire from a June 2011 presentation reads, "SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit." Another slide describes it as a "rich data set" and "high impact" because "usage is increasing," specifically referring to notifications sent to mobile devices from companies such as airlines, healthcare providers and banks.
James Ball, a special projects editor for The Guardian and author of the report, tweeted an image of a top secret document that shows the type of information the NSA was able to gather from the 194 million messages it collected during just one day in April 2011.
Here is what the NSA automatically extract from text messages *every day*: http://t.co/WyJnSX4Qui pic.twitter.com/DucMOOrdkK
— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) January 16, 2014
Another tweet from The Guardian explained what the NSA is able to extract on a daily basis.
Here's what #NSA was able to extract on average each day http://t.co/h1qIfOH67g pic.twitter.com/GJfVEvkkBA
— GuardianUS (@GuardianUS) January 16, 2014
The NSA, which by law cannot spy on American citizens, "minimized" communications collected from U.S. phone numbers, suggesting the agency remove the data from its pool.
“In addition, NSA actively works to remove extraneous data, to include that of innocent foreign citizens, as early as possible in the process,” an NSA spokeswoman told The Guardian in a statement.
The spokeswoman said the activities of the Dishfire program are legal and focus on "valid foreign intelligence targets in response to intelligence requirements."
The NSA does, however, retain messages from foreign communications, including allied countries such as the UK. To further complicate the matter, The Guardian reports that the British spy agency GCHQ can access the NSA records collected through Dishfire. GCHQ analysts reportedly cannot search the contents of messages without a warrant.
A GCHQ spokesman would not answer The Guardian's inquiries about its involvement with Dishfire, but he insisted "all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework."
A privacy officer for Vodafone, the world's third-largest mobile telecoms company that also happens to be headquartered in London, said the company is "shocked and surprised" by the revelation, and that it did not have prior knowledge of the program. The officer, speaking to UK's Channel 4 News, went on to say the following:
What you’re describing sounds concerning to us because the regime that we are required to comply with is very clear and we will only disclose information to governments where we are legally compelled to do so, won’t go beyond the law and comply with due process.
But what you’re describing is something that sounds as if that’s been circumvented. And for us as a business this is anathema because our whole business is founded on protecting privacy as a fundamental imperative.
This is the most recent in a series of reports about the NSA's considerable surveillance capabilities enabled by the trove of secret documents Snowden leaked last year.
For more on the NSA's Dishfire program, read the full joint report by The Guardian and UK’s Channel 4 News here.
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