Ride the Lightning

NSA Routinely Collects Contact Lists of Americans

October 15, 2013

The New York Times published yet another alarming story about the National Security Agency yesterday, affirming that it is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans. This has been confirmed by senior intelligence officials as well as top secret documents provided as part of the never ending stream of revelations from Edward Snowden.

The newly disclosed program intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

The NSA is not targeting individuals, but collecting huge volumes of contact lists – amounting to a sizable fraction of the world's e-mail and instant messaging accounts. The data is used to search for hidden connections and to map relationships of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Each day, according to the presentation, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts. How does it get all this data? The NSA has secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities directing traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.

Although the collection takes place overseas, as though that matters, two senior U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They did not offer an estimate but also did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.

Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”

What is clear is that the NSA tried very hard to keep this massive invasion of privacy secret. As I've noted previously, NSA's director, General Keith Alexander, defends bulk data collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying, “You need the haystack to find the needle." (correction with thanks to Gregory Bufithis, the founder and CEO of Project Counsel: Alexander never used the"haystack" reference.  The misattribution is due to this WashingtonPost article that was actually quoting a former senior U.S. intelligenceofficial who had worked with Alexander and the official himself used the"haystack" reference : http://goo.gl/s46Fo5. The actual "haystack"reference comes from U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole's testimony at thesame hearing: "If you're looking for the needle in a haystack, you have tohave the haystack." http://goo.gl/nV3ef4  And the reason I am doubly sure is that we have beenattending the public NSA/intelligence hearings. I had one of my staffers at that particular hearing because it was thefirst public one that permitted outsiders and she has copious notes)

While it may be true that the "needles" they are hunting for today are foreign, many Americans are in the haystack – if history is any guide, it is only a matter of time until they became the needles that the government seeks.

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