Et tu, Angry Birds?

Aaron Jones January 27, 2014 No Comments

UPDATE: A huge bombshell just put out by NBC in collaboration with Glenn Greenwald.

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The NSA and GCHQ are snooping on Facebook and Youtube and, apparently, in real-time.

(The Guardian 1/27/13) The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.

Scooping up information the apps are sending about their users allows the agencies to collect large quantities of mobile phone data from their existing mass surveillance tools – such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks – rather than solely from hacking into individual mobile handsets. (The following are training slides for NSA and GCHQ agents. Don’t miss the 30 min interview with Edward Snowden released today.)

mobile briefing 2 — While GCHQ uses Android apps for most of its examples, it suggests much of the same data could be taken from iPhone apps.

mobile briefing 3 — GCHQ’s targeted tools against individual smartphones are named after characters in the TV series The Smurfs.

More: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/nsa-gchq-smartphone-app-angry-birds-personal-data

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