US spy agency harvesting millions of e-mail contact lists, says Snowden

The US National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many belonging to Americans.

That's according to senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection programme, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and "buddy lists" from instant messaging services. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronises a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizeable fraction of the world's e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

On a single day last year, the NSA's Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. This means 250 million would be gathered in a year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of web-based e-mail accounts.