When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spy agencies have plotted how to lurk in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.
In their globe-spanning surveillance of terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up.
According to dozens of previously undisclosed, classified documents, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew information such as users’ smartphone identification codes and where they have been that day.
The NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were working together to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Since then, the agencies have traded recipes for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, phone logs and the geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services.
The eavesdroppers’ pursuit of mobile networks has been outlined in earlier reports, but the secret documents, shared by The New York Times, The Guardian and Pro-Publica, offer more details of their ambitions for smartphones and the apps that run on them. The efforts were part of an initiative called “the mobile surge,” according to a 2011 British document, an analogy to the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. One NSA analyst’s enthusiasm was evident in the title - “Golden Nugget!” - given to one slide for a top-secret 2010 talk describing iPhones and Android phones as rich resources, one document states.
The scale and the specifics of the data haul are not clear. The documents show that the two agencies routinely obtain information from certain apps, particularly some of those introduced earliest to cellphones. With some newer apps, including Angry Birds, the agencies have a similar capability, the documents show, but it’s unclear whether the spies have put that into practice. Some personal data, developed in profiles by advertising companies, could be particularly sensitive: A secret 2012 British intelligence document says that spies can scrub smartphone apps that contain details such as a user’s “political alignment” and sexual orientation.
President Barack Obama announced new restrictions this month to better protect the privacy of ordinary Americans and foreigners from government surveillance, including limits on how the NSA can view “metadata” of Americans’ phone calls - the routing information, time stamps and other data associated with calls. But he did not address the avalanche of information that the intelligence agencies get from leaky apps and other smartphone functions.
And though he expressed concern about advertising companies that collect information on people to send tailored ads to their mobile phones, he offered no hint that U.S. spies routinely seize that data. Nothing in the secret reports indicates that the companies cooperate with the spy agencies to share the information; the topic is not addressed.
The agencies have long been intercepting earlier generations of cellphone traffic such as text messages and metadata from nearly every segment of the mobile network - and, more recently, computer traffic running on Internet pipelines. Because those networks carry the rush of data from leaky apps, the agencies have a ready-made way to collect and store this new resource. The documents do not address how many users might be affected, whether they include Americans, or how often analysts would see personal data, with so much information collected automatically.
“NSA does not profile everyday Americans as it carries out its foreign intelligence mission,” the agency said in a written response to questions about the program. “Because some data of U.S. persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process.” Similar protections, the agency said, are in place for “innocent foreign citizens.”
The British spy agency declined to comment on any specific program, but said all its activities complied with the country’s law.
Because smartphones also function as computers - allowing users to surf the Web and send emails - they generate and also rely on data. One secret report says that just by updating Android software, a user sent more than 500 lines of data about the phone’s history and use onto the network.
Such information helps mobile ad companies, for example, create detailed profiles of people based on how they use their mobile devices, where they travel, what apps and websites they open, and other factors. Advertising firms might triangulate Web shopping data and browsing history to guess whether someone is wealthy or has children, for example.
The agencies scoop up this data, mining it for new information and comparing it with their lists of intelligence targets.
One secret 2010 British document suggests that the agencies collect such a huge volume of “cookies” - the digital traces left on a mobile device or a computer when someone visits a website - that classified computers were having trouble storing it all.
“They are gathered in bulk, and are currently our single largest type of events,” the document says.
The two agencies displayed a particular interest in Google Maps, which is accurate to within a few yards or better in some locations. Intelligence agencies collected so much data from the app that “you’ll be able to clone Google’s database” of global searches for directions, according to a top-secret NSA report from 2007.
“It effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system,” a secret 2008 report by the British agency says.
In December, The Washington Post, citing the Snowden documents, reported that the NSA was using metadata to track cellphone locations outside the United States and was using ad cookies to connect Internet addresses with physical locations.
In another example, a secret 20-page British report dated 2012 includes the computer code needed to pluck the profiles generated when Android users play Angry Birds. The app was created by Rovio Entertainment, of Finland, and has been downloaded more than a billion times, the company has said.
Rovio drew public criticism in 2012 when researchers claimed that the app was tracking users’ locations and gathering other data and passing it to mobile ad companies. In a statement on its website, Rovio says that it may collect its users’ personal data, but that it abides by some restrictions. For example, the statement says, “Rovio does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 years of age.”
The report noted that the profiles vary depending on which of the ad companies - which include Burstly and Google, two of the largest online advertising businesses - compiles them. Most profiles contain a string of characters that identifies the phone, along with basic data on the user such as age, sex and location. One profile notes whether the user is currently listening to music or making a call, and another has an entry for household income.
Google declined to comment for this article, and Burstly did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Saara Bergstrom, a Rovio spokesman, said the company had no knowledge of the intelligence programs. “Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned,” Bergstrom said, referring to the two spy agencies.
The agencies have had occasional success - at least by their own reckoning - when they start with something closer to a traditional investigative tip or lead. The spies say that tracking smartphone traffic helped break up a bomb plot by al-Qaida in Germany in 2007. The NSA said that to crack the plot, it wove together mobile data with emails, log-ins and Web traffic. Similarly, mining smartphone data helped lead to arrests of members of a drug cartel hit squad in the 2010 murder of an employee of a U.S. consulate in Mexico.
But the data, whose volume is soaring as mobile devices have begun to dominate the technological landscape, is a crushing amount of information for the spies to sift through. As smartphone data builds up in U.S. and British databases, the agencies sometimes seem a bit at a loss on what to do with it all, the documents show.
In 2009, the agencies each analyzed a tiny sliver of their cellphone databases. Crunching just one month of NSA cellphone data, a report said, required 120 computers and turned up 8,615,650 “actors” - callers of interest. A similar run using three months of British data came up with 24,760,289 actors.
Information for this article was contributed by Ginger Thompson of The New York Times. Jeff Larson is a reporter at Pro-Publica.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/28/2014