The NSA is tracking 5 billion cellphone calls every day

  We are just now beginning to learn exactly how extensive the NSA cellphone tracking is and it is even more vast than I thought it was. the NSA is tracking cellphone usage to the tune of nearly 5 billion calls a day.

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

  Needless to say, when the government is tracking this type of volume of calls it goes without saying that millions of innocent Americans are also being caught in this surveillance ring:

One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.

  But have no fear, this is unintentional and is considered an acceptable and foreseen side effect:

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

  This will be defended as a necessary tool in order to keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks but if this is true how come it did nothing to stop the Boston Marathon bombing? After all, the Tsarnaev brothers traveled to their home country where they received training and I would guess they used cellphones (probably even Obamaphones for they did collect an untold amount of welfare) and this program did nothing to catch them in time.

  It makes you wonder what the true goal of this program really is…..