The National Security Agency vacuums up about 5 billion cell phone records each day that it uses to map locations and associations of foreigners – but also inevitably some Americans as well, according to top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor. The NSA’s global cellphone data-collection system, code named CO-TRAVELER, has been one of the agency’s most far flung and prolific technical tools in terms of the sheer amount of data collected, according to The Washington Post, which posted the documents online late Wednesday. The goal is to find terrorists and improve national security. The CO-TRAVELER system taps into fiber optic cable systems worldwide, capturing cellphone “metadata” as they flow across those lines – data that include the location of the caller and who is being called, not the contents of the phone conversation itself, the Post reported.

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