National Security Agency Maps Social Connections

According to the latest Snowden leak, for the last three years, the National Security Agency has been creating sophisticated graphs of the US citizens’ social connections.
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Investigating the shedloads of information the agency has collected, NSA is now able to tell who your friends are, your locations at certain times, your travel companions and other personal data.

One of the slides from a leaked NSA presentation reveals the way it uses e-mail and phone information in order to analyze the relationships of foreign intelligence targets. Another file revealed that the NSA was told to carry out large-scale graph analysis on communications metadata “without having to check foreignness of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier”.

The NSA was mix and matching communications information with public, commercial and other sources. The list included bank codes, insurance data, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls, GPS location data, and even property records and unspecified tax information.

It seems that the agency may also know more about foreign citizens than their own government does. The Americans may also have been caught up in the effort. Actually, lots of foreigners might know the US citizens and sometimes send them emails.