Categories: Security News

NSA Collected 534 Million Records of Phone Calls and Text Messages of Americans

An official Report released by U.S. Intelligence agency revealed that Spy agency NSA Collected around 534 Million Records of Phone Calls and Text Messages of U.S Citizens.

This list of data has been collected 2017 alone which is very less than billions of records collected per day by  NSA’s old bulk surveillance system on 2013 which was Revealed by Edward Snowden.

During this operation, NSA collects sensitive include including numbers and time of a call or text message, but not their content.

Privacy advocates who all are concerned about potential government intrusion into the lives of U.S peoples are raising questions about this collection of call records.

According to Reuters Report, The sharp increase from 151 million occurred during the second full year of a new surveillance system established at the spy agency after U.S. Congress passed a law in 2015 that sought to limit its ability to collect such records in bulk.

U.S. intelligence agency report

These records are comprised of metadata about calls (which includes time, duration, and the numbers of both recipient and caller)

This new report an annual set of surveillance-related statistics issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not explain why the number of records increased so dramatically.

In this case, The NSA has found that a number of factors may influence the number of records collected, Timothy Barrett, a spokesman at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.

U.S. intelligence officials have said the number of records collected would include multiple calls made to or from the same phone numbers and involved a level of duplication when obtaining the same record of a call from two different companies.

After the N.S.A. put the record sets obtained from the telecoms into its databases, intelligence analysts queried that data using 31,196 search terms associated with Americans last year, up from 22,360 a year earlier.

Balaji

BALAJI is an Ex-Security Researcher (Threat Research Labs) at Comodo Cybersecurity. Editor-in-Chief & Co-Founder - Cyber Security News & GBHackers On Security.

Recent Posts

VS Code Extension with 9 Million Installs Attacks Developers with Malicious Code

Microsoft has removed two widely-used Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions, “Material Theme Free” and…

1 hour ago

New Anubis Ransomware Targets Windows, Linux, NAS, and ESXi x64/x32 Environments

A new ransomware group, dubbed Anubis, has emerged as a significant threat in the cybersecurity…

1 hour ago

WordPress Admins Warned of Fake Plugins Injecting Malicious Links into Websites

A new wave of cyberattacks targeting WordPress websites has been uncovered, with attackers leveraging fake…

1 hour ago

LARVA-208 Hackers Compromise 618 Organizations Stealing Logins and Deploying Ransomware

A newly identified cybercriminal group, LARVA-208, also known as EncryptHub, has successfully infiltrated 618 organizations…

1 hour ago

RustDoor and Koi Stealer Malware Attack macOS to Steal Login Credentials

A new wave of sophisticated cyberattacks targeting macOS systems has been identified, involving two malware…

1 hour ago

Microsoft Defender Leverages Machine Learning to Block Malicious Command Executions

The modern cybersecurity landscape is witnessing an unprecedented surge in sophisticated attack techniques, with adversaries…

1 hour ago