Is NSA Spying on Your Angry Birds Game?

January 28, 2014|4:50 pm

An employee works inside an office of Rovio, the company which created the video game Angry Birds, in Shanghai June 20, 2012.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has the capability to access to the personal information of millions of Americans via apps on smartphones, according to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. A civil liberties expert denounced the misuse of this technology as a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

"Monitoring someone through an app is as valid a means as any other to spy on a legitimate target; monitoring everyone whether through their apps, their web browsing, or their phone records is dangerous," Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute, told The Christian Post in a Tuesday statement.

According to reports from The New York Times, the Guardian, and ProPublica, the NSA can discover a person's location, political leanings, and even sexual orientation through mobile mapping, gaming, and social networking apps common to the world's estimated 1 billion smartphones. The documents do not say whether or not NSA has used this capability.

"The size and scope of the program isn't publicly known, but the reports suggest that U.S. and British intelligence easily get routine access to data generated by apps such as the Angry Birds game franchise or the Google Maps navigation service," NBC reported.

"It's important not to get too distracted by the specific technical means of data collection, when what's most important and not, alas, entirely clear from recent stories is the scale of and standard for collection," Sanchez told CP. He argued that, so long as the government is monitoring "specific targets subject to court orders," it does not matter how the information is discovered.

The data mining becomes a problem, some privacy advocates believe, when the NSA collects data from everyone, regardless of reasonable cause for suspicion. Sanchez attacked "the larger tendency we've seen in the intelligence community to indiscriminately siphon up reams of data, mostly from innocent people, in order to comb through it later." This, he argued, likely violates the Fourth Amendment.

Photos of Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), and U.S. President Barack Obama are printed on the front pages of local English and Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong in this illustration photo June 11, 2013.

Sanchez delved into the legal distinctions of the problem. If the NSA pulls the data "live off the wire in transit, rather than obtaining it from the companies," this spying amounts to a wiretap, "which is supposed to be subject to more stringent standards."

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Is NSA Spying on Your Angry Birds Game?