India was intensely targeted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the number one target of spying among the BRIC group of emerging nations like Brazil, Russia and China, a new report shows.
According to top-secret documents provided to The Hindu by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, billions of pieces of information were collected from its telephone and internet networks just in 30 days.
The American spy agency carried out intelligence gathering activities in India using at least two major programs, The Hindu report said.
The first method was Boundless Informant, a data-mining system which keeps track of how many calls and emails are collected by the security agency; and the second one is PRISM, a program which intercepts and collects actual content from the networks.
The high volume of metadata taken from India – 6.3 billion in March of 2013 – means that the US agency collected information on millions of calls, messages and emails every day within India, or between India and a foreign country.
IT experts say a detailed account of an individual™s life can be constructed from metadata, which is actually the record of phone number of every caller and recipient; the unique serial number of the phones involved; the time and duration of each phone call; and potentially the location of each caller and recipient at the time of the call.
Citizen™s rights groups in India say the NSA spying is a serious violation of people™s privacy and personal data.
œBy accessing metadata, you can learn an awful lot about an individual. With mobile phones, location data has now been added to metadata. With the Internet, you can in addition understand someone™s location in a social network in much more detail, as well as understand how that network relates to other networks. If you put all of this together, you get quite a detailed map of someone™s movements, who they hang out and what drives their lives,” said Anja Kovacs, project director at Internet Democracy Project, a New Delhi-based group working for online freedom of speech.
The report said that Iran was the country where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered. It™s followed by Pakistan. Jordan came third, Egypt fourth, and India fifth.
In June, Snowden first disclosed that the NSA collects data of phone records and Internet communication of American citizens and other nationals around the world.
AHT/AGB
Copyright: Press TV