The Washington Post's new report detailing the NSA's collection of location information on cell phones is blunt. The NSA's ability to track location is "staggering," meaning that it is "able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile." Including the efforts of Edward Snowden. According to documents provided by Snowden, the agency collects 5 billion location records around the world a day, a number that a May 2012 NSA memo suggested could be "outpacing [its] ability to ingest, process and store" the information. The information it collects is extremely revelatory, tracking when phones are turned on and off and move into the range of different cell towers.



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