The Guardian reported last week that the National Security Agency (NSA) program, code named “Dishfire,” collected almost 200 million text messages from various parts of the world daily in April 2011. The agency then used that data to extract information about an individual’s financial habits, social connections, travel plans, and more. Much of this information was revealed in an agency presentation from 2011, subtitled, “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit.”
Additionally, according to The Guardian, “Prefer,” a separate NSA program, conducted automated analysis to extract:
- More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)[;]
- Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts[;]
- More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images[; and,]
- Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users[.]
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