Prism: NSA puts our contacts in the pocket

Documents released by Edward Snowden also reveal that the NSA collects every day hundreds of thousands of address books at their Internet traffic.

 Address books. What seems quite logical since the role of intelligence is to know which are the contacts of their "targets", which they attend, with whom they share information ... All the network a person can then help them find that person physically or to find evidence of his involvement in ongoing cases. Thus, address books can recover emails, phone numbers, addresses, links with the target (family, colleagues, friends ...), etc.. A real mine of information.

Washington Post publishes this new revelation, through the study material provided by Edward Snowden. In particular the Americans are affected by this collection of address books, although the United States has always denied include their own citizens in the monitoring device called Prism.

690000 address books sucked in one day

The documents posted online by the American Journal reveal that one day (in this example 10 January 2012), 689 243 address books were drawn by the NSA: 444743 from Yahoo, 105,068 of 'Hotmail, 82,857 of Facebook, 33,697 Gmail, and 22,881 other services. These data are collected as it travels over the Internet (and not in the servers of private companies such as Google), via access around the world, but not in the United States points to escape the law FISA, which governs the protection of the private lives of Americans.

Last Thursday, Edward Snowden has received an award from the association "The Government Accountability Project," consisting of former NSA, CIA, FBI or the U.S. Department of Justice. His award was presented in Moscow, the country where the young American lives in exile.