90% of People the NSA Spies on Are Not Real Targets, Report Says

Follow Us

The National Security Agency's wide-reaching Internet surveillance dragnet sweeps up more ordinary Internet users' communications than previously thought, according to a new report.

Nine out of 10 people on which the NSA spies are actually not the intended targets of its surveillance, and half of those are Americans, a Washington Post investigation revealed.

See also: Germany Arrests Double Agent Allegedly Spying for the U.S.

Published on Saturday, the report is based on a treasure trove of 160,000 intercepted conversations, including more than 120,000 instant messages, roughly 22,000 emails and nearly 4,000 social-network messages coming from 11,400 unique accounts. The conversations spanned from 2009 to 2012, and were provided to The Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. They were collected using Internet-surveillance programs such as PRISM and Upstream, which taps directly into the Internet backbone. Read more...

More about Privacy, Surveillance, Us World, Us, and World