NSA Snowden Leaks: Hundreds of Email Contact Lists Collected by NSA

Information about the surveillance programs employed by the National Security Agency keeps being published from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's leaks. This time it's email and instant messenger lists that the U.S. agency is slurping up.

The report comes from the Washington Post, one of the newspapers publishing stories from the top-secret documents leaked by Snowden. According to the report, the NSA has been collecting and analyzing millions of contact lists from personal email accounts and instant messaging services as they travel across the global internet.

The intercepts of contact lists has not previously been known before, and it includes those of many Americans. That's because, according to the Washington Post, "rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world's email and instant messaging accounts."

The NSA is using this vacuuming of data to search for connections between individuals and terrorism targets, and to map relationships between those foreign intelligence targets which the NSA is interested in tracking.

The size of the contact list collection is immense. According to the report, based on an internal NSA slide show presentation, the NSA's so-called "crown jewel" division, the Special Source Operations branch, collected a total of 444,743 email contact lists from Yahoo, 105,068 from Microsoft-owned Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and 22,881 from other email programs.

And that's in one single, typical day.

As that intake is described as a normal day at the NSA, the figures add up to more than 250 million email contact lists seized - roughly equivalent to 10 percent of all internet users on the globe - per year. On top of that, about half a million buddy lists from messaging services are collected per day.

According to two unnamed senior U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to the Washington Post, many Americans' data are collected in the broad-sweeping program, even though the NSA collects the data overseas - endorsing an approximate figure in the "millions or tens of millions." If done in the United States, collection of contact lists in bulk would be illegal, according to the AP.

A spokesperson for the NSA, Shawn Turner, said that the agency has rules requiring it to "minimize dissemination" of data that identifies U.S. citizens or permanent residence. Similarly, one of the anonymous U.S. intelligence officials said that the agency has "checks and balances" built into its collection tools to protect the privacy of Americans.

Previously, internet companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have denied allowing "direct access" to their servers' data, despite being named as participants in the NSA's PRISM metadata-collection program. Yahoo, Google, and Facebook spokespersons told the Washington Post variations on the theme of "we did not know or assist" in messaging or email contact list collection.

One possible reason that Yahoo emails lists were collected inordinately more than others' is that Yahoo does not encrypt connections to its users by default. Yahoo has announced that it will begin encrypting all email connections starting in 2014.