The vast majority of communications intercepted by the National Security Agency were not sent by targeted foreign threats – but they provide some of the most valuable information, The Washington Post reported.
The Post published a story Sunday detailing a four-month review of about 160,000 intercepted email and text message conversations involving 11,000 online accounts provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The Post reported that about 90 percent of the information involves names and email addresses of U.S. residents.
“Among the most valuable contents – which the Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations – are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks,” the Post reported.
But the Post also described “useless” communications NSA retained that include “a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality.”
The communications speak of “love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes.”
The NSA has catalogued information on more than 10,000 email account holders who were never targeted, the Post noted. The information included photos of kids in bathtubs and kissing their mothers – and of women modeling lingerie or posing in skimpy bikini tops.
The NSA can target only foreign nationals living overseas unless it obtains a warrant from a special surveillance court. The Post said visitors to online chat rooms also visited by a target or merely reading the discussion were included in the data sweeps.
© 2014 USA TODAY. All rights reserved.
