- Joined
- Apr 13, 2011
- Messages
- 34,951
- Reaction score
- 16,311
- Gender
- Undisclosed
- Political Leaning
- Socialist
The National Security Agency's court-approved authority to access and analyze phone records three "hops" away from a suspected terrorist's phone number has alarmed civil liberties groups like the ACLU, which estimated that just one starting number could yield 2.5 million people's phone records.Now, new research from Stanford graduate students Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler suggests that the NSA's dragnet could be bigger -- much bigger.
"Under current FISA Court orders, the NSA may be able to analyze the phone records of a sizable proportion of the United States population with just one seed number,"they wrote in a blog post published Monday. "And by the way, there are tens of thousands of qualified seed numbers."
Under the rules approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the agency's broad-reaching phone metadata collection program can only sift through details on who Americans called and when if the caller is three or fewer degrees of separation, or "hops," from a number suspected of associations with terrorism.
That will yield 2.5 million people's records alone if, as the ACLU assumed, the average person has 40 phone contacts. But Mayer and Mutchler say that between voicemail, spam robocalls and calling services like Skype, many of us are connected by just a small set of phone numbers.
Read more @: The NSA's Reach Might Be Even Bigger Than We Thought
This **** needs to ****ing stop! :2mad::2mad: