Der Spiegel of German news weekly said in a report on Sunday that the U.S. National Security Agency can track user’s private data on all smartphones.
German news weekly quotes internal documents from the NSA and GCHQ, its British counterpart, in which they described setting up specialized team to crack protective and security measures on leading smartphones, like Blackberry, Samsung and iPhone.
The private data includes SMS traffic, contact list, call list and information on your location.
Spiegel’s report also claimed that the NSA has created specialized working groups to with each network distributors, with the purpose of obtaining secret entry to the data on the smartphones.
The documents did not imply that NSA is going to do mass surveillance of phone users. They will only use these things to spy and track suspicious individuals.
The report didn't detail how these data were obtained. However, one of its authors, Laura Poitras – an American filmmaker – is purportedly in close contacts with NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
The report comes after another report revealing that the agency has the ability to break into the encryption technology of all sites. Users rely on this technology in keeping their private e-mails and confidential information safe and secured from snooping eyes. Internet experts are calling for a rewrite because of this.
According to the New York Times’ report last Thursday, the NSA has cracked way too much of the digital encryption used by individual and corporation Web users. The same was also reported in Britain’s Guardian Newspaper and ProPublica, a nonprofit news website. It was described in the report how the NSA invested billions of dollars to make nearly every user’s private information accessible for government use in 2000.
The NSA, by doing that, has built powerful supercomputers to crack encryption codes and coupled with unidentified technology companies to create “back doors” into their software. Creation of “back doors” would permit government to access user’s digital data before it was encrypted and sent over the Internet.
