The National Security Agency (NSA) is said to be spying on contacts list from personal email accounts of millions of Americans.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts email address books and "buddy lists" from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.
Recent reports suggest that NSA is collecting contact lists of individual emails in large numbers, which becomes a major chunk of the world's email and instant messaging accounts. By going through and analyzing the collected data, NSA tries to find hidden connections and relationships of foreign intelligence targets.
"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," reports The Washington Post.
The Washington Post report also points out that each day, the agency collects an estimated of 500,000 contacts on buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from individual email accounts.
The collection of this large amount of data include arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or with allied intelligence services, who are in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet's main data routes.
Even though the collection of data takes place outside the country, two senior U.S. intelligence officials admitted that it also collects contacts of millions of Americans.
The Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, says that the agency is primarily focused on developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. They also claim that the agency is not interested in the data of "ordinary Americans."
The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to "minimize the acquisition, use and dissemination" of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
In order to counter terrorism, the NSA revealed in June that it collected nearly all U.S. call records under a separate program, which also generated significant controversy.
