America's National Security Agency has developed an accurate
tool for documenting and examining where intelligence information comes from,
The Guardian reported Saturday.
The British newspaper said it had obtained top-secret
documents about the NSA data-mining tool, called Boundless Informant, that
"details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it
collects from computer and telephone networks."
This tool reportedly focuses on the classification of
communication records, known as metadata, as opposed to Internet content or
emails. According to The Guardian, the obtained documents reveal that the NSA
collected "almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from U.S. computer
networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013."
The Guardian said that a confidential "global heat
map" showing a snapshot of the tool indicates that most of the NSA
intelligence collected was on Iran, with 14 billion reports, followed by 13.5
billion on Pakistan and then Jordan and Egypt.
The debate over whether the U.S. government is violating
citizens' privacy rights while trying to protect them from terrorism escalated
dramatically on Thursday amid reports that authorities have collected data on
millions of phone users and tapped into servers at nine internet companies.
A secret program called PRISM is the leading source of raw
material for the National Security Agency, the secretive U.S. intelligence
operation that monitors electronic communications.
U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on
Saturday criticized media reports about the large-scale government collection
of private internet data.
"Over the last week we have seen reckless disclosures
of intelligence community measures used to keep Americans safe," he said
in a statement.
U.S. intelligence services tapped directly into the servers
of at least nine leading internet companies including Google, Facebook, Apple,
Yahoo, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Microsoft to extract emails, voice calls,
videos, photos and other communications from their customers without the need
for a warrant. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Apple denied any involvement with
PRISM.
Clapper said he could not provide all the details about the
program or correct all misinformation in the article without disclosing
classified information, but said he sought to "dispel some of the
myths" surrounding the intelligence effort.
He maintained that PRISM had not gathered any data without
the knowledge of the companies involved and said the program was not a secret
data collection program, but an internal government computer system. He did not
share information about the collected data, but claimed it had prevented
terrorist attacks.
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's
not what this program is about," Obama told reporters during a visit to
California's Silicon Valley.
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