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| An example of how the CO TRAVELER program tracks people by measuring distances from cellular towers. |
It has been leaked that many of the major tech companies in America have enabled the NSA unsupervised and warrant-less access to their data centers. Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have all been specified as companies that have built back doors into their infrastructure for the NSA. Even if the NSA is not allowed access to these data centers explicitly, the agency taps into the fiber data connections between data centers. This connection is unencrypted so it is easy to analyze this data.
Not only have we learned more about the means collecting data, we have also learned of scary functionality of the system. The NSA program titled: Co Traveler tracks hundreds of millions of cellular phones around the globe without user permission. The system tracks phone in real-time for similarities in travel patterns to know suspects. This means that if you take the same bus and subway to work everyday you could be considered an accomplice of a terrorist suspect and become a suspect yourself.
We can assess that the National Security Agency has the ability to probe many aspects of our lives with absolutely zero input from a judge or other authoritative figure. The NSA can probe your life with almost zero cause for suspicion. It appears that an individual could be targeted near coincidentally. It is scary to think the government knows everything from your location and travel patterns to whether or not you called your grandmother in the past month even how much money you spent on your credit card for that new TV last week.
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