WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) – U.S. and British intelligence
agencies have plotted ways to gather data from Angry Birds and
other smartphone apps that leak users’ personal information onto
global networks, the New York Times reported on Monday.
It was citing previously undisclosed intelligence documents
made available by fugitive American spy agency contractor Edward
Snowden.
The Times said the U.S. National Security Agency and its
British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters,
had tried to exploit increasing volumes of personal data that
spill onto networks from new generations of mobile phone
technology.
Among these new intelligence tools were “leaky” apps on
smartphones that could disclose users’ locations, age, gender
and other personal information.
The U.S. and British agencies were working together on ways
to collect and store data from smartphone apps by 2007, the
newspaper reported.
The agencies have traded methods for collecting location
data from a user of Google Maps and for gathering address books,
buddy lists, phone logs and geographic data embedded in photos
when a user posts to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr,
LinkedIn, Twitter and other services, the Times said.
Snowden, who is living in asylum in Russian, faces espionage
charges in the United States after disclosing the NSA’s massive
telephone and Internet surveillance programs last year.
His revelations and the resulting firestorm of criticism
from politicians and privacy rights activists prompted U.S.
President Barack Obama to announce intelligence-gather reforms
on Jan. 17, including a ban on eavesdropping on the leaders of
close allies and limits on the collection of telephone data.
The Times report said the scale of the data collection from
smartphones was not clear but the documents showed that the two
national agencies routinely obtained information from certain
apps, including some of the earliest ones introduced to mobile
phones.
The documents did not say how many users were affected or
whether they included Americans.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said U.S. surveillance
agencies were only interested in collecting data on people
considered a threat to the United States.
“To the extent data is collected by the NSA through whatever
means, we are not interested in the communications of people who
are not valid foreign intelligence targets, and we are not after
the information of ordinary Americans,” Carney told a regular
White House news conference.
Any such surveillance was focused on “valid foreign
intelligence targets … I mean terrorists, proliferators, other
bad actors (who) use the same communications tools that others
use,” he said.
(Reporting by Jim Loney; Editing by David Storey, Bernard Orr)
