US and British spies tap data from smartphone apps
– ONLINE-
Documents leaked by United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that US and British surveillance agencies worked together sicne 2007 in a bid to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps such as Angry Birds, according to a report by New York Times on Monday.
According to a NSA document, NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have worked together since 2007 to develop ways to access the users’ locations, visited websites and contacts through a number of mapping and gaming applications. The techniques used were similar to those used for intercepting mobile internet traffic and text message data.
The joint spying programme “effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system” one 2008 document from the British intelligence agency is quoted as saying.
Another GCHQ report, in 2012, outlined how to extract information from Angry Birds user information from phones on the Android operating system. The game has been downloaded 1.7 billion times across the world.
Other apps mentioned included the photo-sharing website Flickr, movie-based social network Flixster and applications that connect to Facebook.
The extent of data gathering by the agencies is unclear in the document. The document does not suggest if the smartphone app developers had agreed to provide data to the spy agencies.
In a statement, NSA said it was not interested in collecting data other than “valid foreign intelligence targets”.
“Any implication that NSA’s foreign intelligence collection is focused on the smartphone or social media communications of everyday Americans is not true,” the statement said.
The British agency declined to comment on the matter but maintained that its activities were authorised.