(From USA Today)
The National Security Agency has been collecting contacts from people’s personal email address books and instant messaging accounts in an effort to detect relationships that might be crucial to government security, the Washington Post is reporting.
The agency is collecting the data from overseas points and many of the contacts belong to Americans, the Post reports.
The Post bases its report on word from senior intelligence officials and top secret documents, including a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden..
The majority of the contacts harvested come from Yahoo and Hotmail accounts…
Read more here http://goo.gl/0z8xfr
Yes I read that article this morning, too. An important part says that info was harvested from servers overseas. Those overseas servers being used to “take the load off” the main servers in the US.
Since most large so-called “US” corporations (including our popular ISP’s and webmail account providers) are so globally involved at the financial and operating levels, it’s really easy for them to “play dumb”. Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail all deny that they weren’t aware. Do you believe that? I’ll bet the “others” that are not mentioned are Verizon, ATT, Comcast, et al.
None of them are wholly owned by the US corporation they claim to be. Some are 50% or more owned by foreign entities. I smell a huge rat. Maybe their so-called spam filters are more than what we are made to believe they are? Our emails (incoming and outgoing) have been censored for years. So far, I have no personal address books maintained on any of the web-based email accounts I may have. Now I don’t trust the security of my installed email clients, simply because my ISP can probably infiltrate any aspects of any email program I may have installed on my own computer. Some may think I’m being paranoid, but I don’t care.