NSA builds social graphs of Americans

The US National Security Agency uses American citizens’ personal information to construct their detailed social graphs, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

The sophisticated graphs provide the NSA agents with direct and indirect “contact chains” between Americans and people or organizations overseas that are of foreign intelligence interest, the report said citing documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The data the NSA analyzes comes from phone calls, emails, location services, internet profiles, bank records, and flight manifests of Americans.

The system for collecting and analyzing the data is called Mainway, which was first revealed by USA Today in 2006.

Mainway was taking in 700 million phone record per day in 2011, according to an internal NSA bulletin. In August, 2011, the system began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cell phone records daily from an unnamed American service provider, the report said.

Documents disclosed by Snowden show that the NSA is spending a lot to create a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion “record events” daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes.

According to the Times, the NSA declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the spy effort.

Snowden, the leaker of NSA surveillance programs, was granted temporary asylum in Russia on August 1 after being stuck in a transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for more than a month.

He is wanted in the US on espionage charges for leaking classified documents.