Knowledge that the National Security Agency and the British Government Communications Headquarters have been working together to gather personal information from the public doesn’t come as much of a surprise as the ability to look in on individuals’ technologic activity has existed for years. What’s new this time is the platform through which the public is being watched and recorded. According to documents provided by Edward Snowden and jointly released by The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica, the NSA and CGHQ are sourcing personal information from “leaky” smartphone apps, gathering information on “networks connected, websites visited, buddy lists, documents downloaded, encryption used and supported, [and] user agents” (1). Such targeted apps include the ever popular game Angry Birds, Google Maps, Facebook, Flikr, Flixter, and Winzip, undoubtedly among others that remain unspecified. The success and increased effort to accumulate user data is evident in the budget increase of $563 million in 2007, the year the NSA documents were created. Although there is no eminent threat imposed on individuals by the NSA, it remains unsettling to know that one’s personal settings and information can be corralled by the government for as simple an action as playing a game on your smartphone.
The leaked documents shared by The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica can be found on Documentcloud along with some BGHQ documents.
