The NSA and its British counterpart are tapping popular smartphone apps such as Angry Birds to peek into the tremendous amounts of very personal data those bits of software collect -- including age, location, sex and even sexual preferences, according to new reports from the New York Times and The Guardian.

Citing confidential documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the reports detail efforts to supplement data collection from cell phone carriers and smartphones by tapping into "leaky" apps themselves.

"Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger," the Guardian said.

That information can come from a user profile, which may contain martial status -- options included "single," "married," "divorced," "swinger" and more, the report said.

Both spy agencies showed a particular interest in Google Maps, which is accurate to within a few yards or better in some locations and would clearly pass along data about a phone owner's whereabouts.

"It effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system," reads a secret 2008 report by the NSA's sister spy agency, according to the New York Times.

More surprising is the wide range of apps that the agencies cull for data, including innocent-seeming apps such as Angry Birds. One document in particular from GCHQ listed what information can be extracted from which apps, citing Android apps but suggesting the same data was available from the iPhone platform.

Angry Birds maker Rovio said it had no knowledge of any NSA or GCHQ programs or mechanisms for tapping into its users' data.

"Rovio doesn't have any previous knowledge of this matter, and have not been aware of such activity in 3rd party advertising networks," said Saara Bergstrom, Rovio's VP of marketing and communications. "Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned [NSA and GCHQ]."

Mobile photo uploads appear to be a particularly rich source of information for the spy agencies as well. Metadata in the photos -- which is often ultimately stripped from pictures by social media sites like Facebook and Twitter -- is briefly available.

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NSA spying through Angry Birds, Google Maps, leaked documents reportedly reveal

Alluding to private documents provided by former CIA employee and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, 30, various reports detail attempts to amass large amounts of personal information from users via cell phone carriers and smartphones by utilizing leaky apps. Snowden disclosed documents to the Guardian in late 2012 that gave a detailed (and somewhat disturbing) history of the agency's surveillance on gaming and electronic activities. The NSA documents also stated that British and American intelligence organizations forcibly spied on online activity through Xbox Live, the virtual world Second Life and the popular MMO World of Warcraft since 2006. 2006. That means the government has been monitoring your eight-hour long Gears of War sessions for seven years.

Edward Snowden, 30 Courtesy/Wikipedia

When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the players location, age, sex and other personal information, the New York Times reported on Jan. 27. The N.S.A. and Britains Government Communications Headquarters were working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden.

The shady efforts were part of an initiative entitled the mobile surge, according to a 2011 British document that targeted mobile users, calling iPhones and Android phones rich resources of information.

The amount of data aggregated from users wasnt clear. The documents show the NSA and the British agency regularly collecting information from specific apps, especially older applications. With newer apps and games, like 2009s Angry Birds, the agencies have the ability openly gather personal information from users, but it remains unclear what government spies are considering useful. Certain information is possibly more sensitive a secret British document from 2012 stated that spies can scrub apps to find data like an individuals political alignment and sexual preference. A 2008 document also stated that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system.

The NSA has been tapping into users' smartphones, according to leaked documents from Edward Snowden. Courtesy/Wikipedia

Earlier this January, President Obama acknowledged that the electronic invasion of privacy posed a threat to the civil liberties of Americans and announced major changes to the manner in which the government finds and uses telephone records. Americas capabilities are unique, President Obama said in a speech at the Justice Department on Jan. 17. And the power of new technologies means that there are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do.

President Obama also empathized with Americans who may be worrying about electronic personal freedom. In our rush to respond to a very real and novel set of threats, the risk of government overreach, the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security also became more pronounced, he added. The combination of increased digital information and powerful supercomputers offers intelligence agencies the possibility of sifting through massive amounts of bulk data to identify patterns or pursue leads that may thwart impending threats. Its a powerful tool. But the government collection and storage of such bulk data also creates a potential for abuse.

Yes, we as Americans desire a government that cares about the safety of its individual citizens but at what cost? Is it necessary to usurp a considerable amount of information from unknowing individuals in the name of protection and safety? Do you think the NSA is within its rights to monitor our online and cell phone activity? Leave a comment below.

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NSA Spying On Apps Like 'Angry Birds,' Does Surveillance Violate Civil Liberties?

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WASHINGTON (AP) As the Obama administration considers ending the storage of millions of phone records by the National Security Agency, the government is quietly funding research to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing whom the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the government's possession. The project is among several ideas that could allow the government to store Americans' phone records with phone companies or a third-party organization, but still search them as needed.

Under the research, U.S. data mining would be shielded by secret coding that could conceal identifying details from outsiders and even the owners of the targeted databases, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press and interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials.

The administration has provided only vague descriptions about changes it is considering to the NSA's daily collection and storage of Americans' phone records, which are presently kept in NSA databanks. To resolve legal, privacy and civil liberties concerns, President Barack Obama this month ordered the attorney general and senior intelligence officials to recommend changes by March 28 that would allow the U.S. to identify suspected terrorists' phone calls without the government itself holding the phone records.

One federal review panel urged Obama to order phone companies or an unspecified third party to store the records; another panel said collecting the phone records was illegal and ineffective and urged Obama to abandon the program entirely.

Internal documents describing the Security and Privacy Assurance Research project do not cite the NSA or its phone surveillance program. But if the project were to prove successful, its encrypted search technology could enable the NSA to conduct secure searches while shifting storage of phone records from agency data banks to either phone companies or a third-party organization.

A DNI spokesman, Michael Birmingham, confirmed that the research was relevant to the NSA's phone records program. He cited "interest throughout the intelligence community" but cautioned that it may be some time before the technology is used.

The intelligence director's office is by law exempt from disclosing detailed budget figures, so it's unclear how much money the government has spent on the project, which is overseen by the DNI's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity office. Birmingham said the research is aimed for use in a "situation where a large sensitive data set is held by one party which another seeks to query, preserving privacy and enforcing access policies."

A Columbia University computer sciences expert who heads one of the DNI-funded teams, Steven M. Bellovin, estimates the government could start conducting encrypted searches within the next year or two.

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US looking to stop spying on NSA spying

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?

As the Obama administration considers ending the storage of millions of phone records by the National Security Agency, the government is quietly funding research to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing whom the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the government's possession. The project is among several ideas that could allow the government to store Americans' phone records with phone companies or a third-party organization, but still search them as needed.

Under the research, U.S. data mining would be shielded by secret coding that could conceal identifying details from outsiders and even the owners of the targeted databases, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press and interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials.

The administration has provided only vague descriptions about changes it is considering to the NSA's daily collection and storage of Americans' phone records, which are presently kept in NSA databanks. To resolve legal, privacy and civil liberties concerns, President Barack Obama this month ordered the attorney general and senior intelligence officials to recommend changes by March 28 that would allow the U.S. to identify suspected terrorists' phone calls without the government itself holding the phone records.

One federal review panel urged Obama to order phone companies or an unspecified third party to store the records; another panel said collecting the phone records was illegal and ineffective and urged Obama to abandon the program entirely.

Internal documents describing the Security and Privacy Assurance Research project do not cite the NSA or its phone surveillance program. But if the project were to prove successful, its encrypted search technology could enable the NSA to conduct secure searches while shifting storage of phone records from agency data banks to either phone companies or a third-party organization.

A DNI spokesman, Michael Birmingham, confirmed that the research was relevant to the NSA's phone records program. He cited "interest throughout the intelligence community" but cautioned that it may be some time before the technology is used.

The intelligence director's office is by law exempt from disclosing detailed budget figures, so it's unclear how much money the government has spent on the project, which is overseen by the DNI's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity office. Birmingham said the research is aimed for use in a "situation where a large sensitive data set is held by one party which another seeks to query, preserving privacy and enforcing access policies."

A Columbia University computer sciences expert who heads one of the DNI-funded teams, Steven M. Bellovin, estimates the government could start conducting encrypted searches within the next year or two.

"If the NSA wanted to deploy something like this it would take one to two years to get the hardware and software in place to start collecting data this way either from phone companies or whatever other entity they decide on," said Bellovin, who is also a former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission.

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US looks at ways to prevent spying on NSA spying

FILE - In this Jan. 23, 2014 file photo, President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington. The U.S. government is looking at ways to prevent anyone from spying on its own surveillance of Americans phone records. As the Obama administration considers shifting the collection of Americans phone records from the National Security Agency to requiring that they be stored at phone companies or elsewhere, its quietly funding research that would allow it to search the information using encryption so that phone company employees or eavesdroppers couldnt see who the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) As the Obama administration considers ending the storage of millions of phone records by the National Security Agency, the government is quietly funding research to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing whom the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the governments possession. The project is among several ideas that could allow the government to store Americans phone records with phone companies or a third-party organization, but still search them as needed.

Under the research, U.S. data mining would be shielded by secret coding that could conceal identifying details from outsiders and even the owners of the targeted databases, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press and interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials.

The administration has provided only vague descriptions about changes it is considering to the NSAs daily collection and storage of Americans phone records, which are presently kept in NSA databanks. To resolve legal, privacy and civil liberties concerns, President Barack Obama this month ordered the attorney general and senior intelligence officials to recommend changes by March 28 that would allow the U.S. to identify suspected terrorists phone calls without the government itself holding the phone records.

One federal review panel urged Obama to order phone companies or an unspecified third party to store the records; another panel said collecting the phone records was illegal and ineffective and urged Obama to abandon the program entirely.

Internal documents describing the Security and Privacy Assurance Research project do not cite the NSA or its phone surveillance program. But if the project were to prove successful, its encrypted search technology could enable the NSA to conduct secure searches while shifting storage of phone records from agency data banks to either phone companies or a third-party organization.

A DNI spokesman, Michael Birmingham, confirmed that the research was relevant to the NSAs phone records program. He cited interest throughout the intelligence community but cautioned that it may be some time before the technology is used.

The intelligence directors office is by law exempt from disclosing detailed budget figures, so its unclear how much money the government has spent on the project, which is overseen by the DNIs Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity office. Birmingham said the research is aimed for use in a situation where a large sensitive data set is held by one party which another seeks to query, preserving privacy and enforcing access policies.

A Columbia University computer sciences expert who heads one of the DNI-funded teams, Steven M. Bellovin, estimates the government could start conducting encrypted searches within the next year or two.

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Preventing spying on NSA spying