The National Security Agency (NSA) hits another blow as former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shared another document to a news publication about the agency abusing its authority by making a graph of social connections of the U.S citizens since 2010.
The New York Times reported that these social graphs made by NSA allow them to know the associations of each citizen they have on list, their locations at certain times of the day, their travel buddies, and other extremely personal information. All these were tracked for intelligence purposes.
Phone calls and e-mail conversations were prohibited years ago but the policy was lifted by the NSA officials in 2010 for them to track even overseas connections.
NSA defended their actions saying that a memorandum was issued January 2011 allowing them to "discover and track" connections between overseas and U.S citizens. The memorandum allowed them to create a "large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness."
NSA refused to disclose the number of people they are currently tracking under this policy and if there were criminals caught.
"All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period," said an NSA spokesman to the the New York Times.
"All of N.S.A.'s work has a foreign intelligence purpose," the spokeswoman added. "Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity."
She also added that the security agency is not doing anything wrong citing a 1979 Supreme court ruling that Americans should not expect privacy on the numbers they were calling. The Justice Department and the Pentagon are permitted to do a social graph and contact chains using the people's "metadata." The information covered is the time, place, and other call and e-mail details except for the content. They don't also need a call to do it.
