NSA analyzes approximately 200 million SMS messages per day

Edward Snowden continues to add fuel to the already tense situation around the US National Security Agency. According to the secret documents published in The Guardian, provided to journalists by Snowden, the NSA's servers analyze and accumulate about 200 million SMS messages sent by users all over the world every day.

The secret program for collecting and analyzing SMS messages is called Dishfire. From the received SMS, NSA specialists receive valuable information on the movement of people, contact information that they send to each other, information on financial payments and much more.

The presentation titled “Text SMS Messages: A Gold Mine for Information” is direct evidence that as early as April 2011, NSA servers processed an average of 194 million text messages per day. Automated programs independently process a huge array of data, isolating the most important moments for the agency from messages.

Along with SMS messages, the NSA also receives some metadata from users' phones, which they even don’t know. For example, information about missed calls is used by the agency to track chains of contacts (in this case, users' pages in social networks are used, data obtained from the phone and from the Internet are compared, after which the agents know exactly who, where and to whom they called). On the day, the agency receives, records and analyzes about 5 million missed call notifications.

The agency controls the crossing of people of any state borders. The phone falls into the roaming zone, and this moment is fixed by the NSA servers. People cross the border about 1,600,000 times a day. The agency also receives approximately 110,000 electronic business cards every day that people send to each other as messages. In addition to text information, these cards can also store photos of people.

More than 80,000 financial transactions can be tracked per day by analyzing SMS messages. Thanks to these data, the agency binds specific plastic cards to certain people.

And finally, it is impossible not to mention that the NSA also tracks geolocation data on the movement of people. They asked via SMS how to find this or that place, or made a meeting with someone in a particular cafe - be sure that the NSA brought this information about your movements to your database. You received a text message confirming the booking of a plane ticket - now the NSA knows exactly where and when you will be.

Summing up the above, it is possible to say with certainty that nowadays it is nowhere impossible to feel protected from a “big brother” who is constantly watching us even when we do not know about it. On the other hand, not every person can, without hesitation, abandon any electronic devices and use of the Internet. Having once again learned that our whole life is an open book for the special services, we can only shake our heads and continue to live as we used to.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/phone/anb-analiziruet-primerno-200-millionov-sms-soobshhenij-v-den.html.