The mass collection of telephone data is necessary to monitor communications between terrorist suspects, the head of a US spy agency said Wednesday.
General Keith Alexander, director of the
National Security Agency, defended the bulk gathering of metadata on
phone calls, saying, "there is no other way that we know of to connect
the dots."
The NSA collects information about which
phone numbers are involved and the duration of calls, but not any
information from actual conversations.
He told senators at a hearing that ending the mass collection programme "is absolutely not an option."
Members
of Congress have called for greater restraints on US spying programmes
after media reports in recent months revealed mass surveillance of
telephone and internet records and spying on international leaders'
mobile communications.
Former government contractor
Edward Snowden began providing information about the extent of US spying
efforts to the media earlier this year, prompting outrage from US
allies and civil libertarians.
US President Barack Obama
has said the US is to unveil "self restraints" on surveillance in the
coming weeks after an internal review.
NSA uses cookies to track surveillance targets
US
National Security Agency is secretly using "cookies" – an Internet tool
that allows advertisers to track consumers – and location data to
pinpoint potential targets for hacking and surveillance.
According
to the internal NSA presentation, provided by former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden and published by The Washington Post, when companies
follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the
agency's technique provides the opportunity to similar tracking by the
government.
The presentation also suggests that the
agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for
offensive hacking operations.
Presentation shows that
the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are using the small tracking
files or "cookies" that advertising networks place on computers to
identify people browsing the Internet.
The intelligence
agencies have found particular use for a part of a Google-specific
tracking mechanism known as the “PREF” cookie, which contains numeric
codes that enable websites to precisely identify a person's browser.
Moreover,
cookies allows NSA to single out an individual's communications in the
immense amount of Internet data in order to send out software that can
hack that person's computer.
Commercial tracking tools
like "cookies", created for identification and targeting consumers with
advertisements, were stumbling-stone for privacy advocates for years.
But
the online ad industry has always insisted that its practices are safe
for users' privacy and benefit consumers by serving them ads that are
more likely to be of interest to them.
The revelation
that the NSA is using these commercial technologies could shift that
debate, handing privacy advocates a new argument for reining in
commercial surveillance.
No comments:
Post a Comment