6. Oppose the FISA Improvements Act. Score: 1
7. Reject the third party doctrine. Score: 0
8. Provide a full public accounting of our surveillance apparatus. Score: 0.5
9. Embrace meaningful transparency reform. Score: 0
10. Reform the FISA court. Score: 1
11. Protect national security whistleblowers. Score: 0
12. Give criminal defendants all surveillance evidence. Score: 0
NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep
President Obama's NSA "reforms" came a day after the Guardian reported that the National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.
The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages -- including their contacts -- is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK's Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of "untargeted and unwarranted" communications belonging to people in the UK.
The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects "pretty much everything it can", according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.
On average, each day the NSA was able to extract:
" More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone's social network from who they contact and when)
" Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts
" More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.
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