Massive NSA Spying Revealed… Oh Wait. It’s Only 248 People.
Image via ShutterstockToday the NSA disclosed statistics on their surveillance activities, and they’ve been spying willy nilly on an incredible number of people in America.
That’s if you consider 248 people to be an “incredible number.”
The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.
As acknowledged in the NSA’s first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, released Friday, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 “known or presumed US persons” in 2013.
During that year, it submitted 178 applications for the data to the Fisa court during that period, which, as first revealed by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden, permitted the ongoing, daily collection of practically all US phone records.
The number of “selectors” NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the “less than 300 times” it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.
It’s almost funny how Spencer Ackerman still tries to continue the MASSIVE SPYING talking points, even as his article reveals that it’s anything but.
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