InsightaaS: Naked Security is a news/blog site hosted by security vendor Sophos. In this post, Lee Munson, founder of Security FAQs, reports on UK coverage of information revealed by Edward Snowden. In the post, Munson states that the Dishfire program “has been in operation from at least May 2008 and, by April 2011, was intercepting 194 million text messages per day.” He also cites a quotation from Stephen Deadman, group privacy officer and head of legal for security, privacy and content standards at Vodafone group, in which Deadman says, “What you’re describing sounds concerning to us…We’re going to be contacting the Government and are going to be challenging them on this. From our perspective, the law is there to protect our customers and it doesn’t sound as if that is what is necessarily happening.”
The National Security Agency (NSA) collects hundreds of millions of text messages from around the world every day, according to the latest revelations from Edward Snowden.
Channel 4 and the Guardian newspaper report that NSA spies collect and store around 200 million messages per day for the purposes of extracting metadata including location data, credit card information and contacts.
The Guardian reports that the documents also reveal that British spies were given access to the collected metadata, but not the actual content, of text messages sent to and from British citizens.
According to GCHQ documents the program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can” as opposed to merely collecting communications data from current surveillance targets…
Read the entire post: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/01/17/nsa-sweeps-up-hundreds-of-millions-of-text-messages-daily/
