The Washington Post reports on how the National Security Agency is sweeping up contacts lists in Americans' e-mail accounts and instant messaging accounts. For example, "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," The Post reported. Over the course of a year, that would be millions of accounts. Is this contact information being paired with the already-revealed collection of nearly every record of phone calls made in the United States?
Even Americans who aren't living or working abroad are having their contact information collected because "data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home. Large technology companies, including Google and Facebook, maintain data centers around the world to balance loads on their servers and work around outages," The Post also reported.
On an amusing note, spam is just as annoying for spies as it is for the rest of us. "Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA — clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value," The Post also reports.
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