NSA Grabs and Stores Millions of Text Messages Per Day

The document collection leaked by Edward Snowden continues to bear fruit; a collaborative investigation between The Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News has revealed that the U.S. government’s National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting millions of text messages every single day from senders all around the world.

The program is called “Dishfire,” and reportedly gathers as much as it can regardless of whether or not a target is actively under surveillance or not. Dishfire gathers key bits of information from the text messages, such as “location, contact networks and credit card details,” according to The Guardian.

The outlet also reports that the UK government has utilized the NSA’s database of text messages in the past in order to search and surveil the text message metadata of citizens in the UK.

It’s another black eye for the agency, which faces reform at the hands of an increasingly pressured Obama administration and a Congress that was lied to by the director of the NSA himself. Just this week alone, the NSA has already garnered negative press for using radio waves to spy on computers that aren’t connected to the Internet. This particular bit of news won’t help the agency’s cause, especially in a day and age where most people are texting a lot more than they’re calling.

You should really check out the rest of the Guardian story on this. It’s a fascinating read, and it’s proof that the bombshells aren’t quite over as far as the Snowden documents are concerned. This whole train started rolling way back in June 2013 and we’re still learning how deep this goes, and to what extent the U.S. government is surveilling its own citizens as well as others from around the world. And I don’t think it’s over yet.