Spy Agencies Tap Data Streaming From Phone Apps
By JAMES GLANZ, JEFF LARSON and ANDREW W. LEHREN
As personal data pour onto mobile networks, American and British
eavesdroppers are prying into so-called leaky apps to extract
geographical data, address books and phone logs, secret documents show.
When
a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and
starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking 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 for 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 everything from the smartphone
identification codes of users to where they have been that day.
The
N.S.A. and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were
working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of
smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents,
provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. 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, telephone logs and the geographic data
embedded in photographs when someone sends a post to the mobile versions
of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other Internet services.
Document
From the National Security Agency
This document from 2010, redacted in places, is one of
several undisclosed classified documents provided by Edward J. Snowden,
the former N.S.A. contractor, and shared by The New York Times, The
Guardian and ProPublica.
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 ProPublica,
offer far 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. An N.S.A. analyst’s enthusiasm was
evident in the breathless title — “Golden Nugget!” — given to a slide
for a top-secret talk in 2010 that described iPhones and Android phones
as rich resources, another document noted.
The
scale and the specifics of the data haul are not clear. The documents
show that the N.S.A. and the British agency routinely obtain information
from certain apps, particularly those introduced earliest to
cellphones. With some newer apps, including Angry Birds, the agencies
have a similar ability, the documents show, but they do not make
explicit whether the spies have put that into practice. Some personal
data, developed in profiles by advertising companies, could be
particularly sensitive: A secret British intelligence document from 2012
said that spies can scrub smartphone apps to collect details like a
user’s “political alignment” and sexual orientation.
President Obama announced new restrictions
this month to better protect the privacy of ordinary Americans and
foreigners from government surveillance, including limits on how the
N.S.A. can view the metadata of Americans’ phone calls — the routing
information, time stamps and other data associated with calls. But he
did not address the information that the intelligence agencies get from
leaky apps and other smartphone functions.
And
while Mr. Obama expressed concern about advertising companies that
collect information on people to send tailored ads to their mobile
phones, he offered no hint that American spies have routinely seized
that data. Nothing in the secret reports indicates that the companies
cooperated with the spy agencies to share the information; the topic is
not addressed.
The
agencies have long been intercepting earlier generations of cellphone
traffic like text messages and metadata from nearly every segment of the
mobile network — and, more recently, computer traffic running on
Internet pipelines. Because those same 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, with so much
information collected automatically, analysts would see personal data.
“N.S.A.
does not profile everyday Americans as it carries out its foreign
intelligence mission,” the agency wrote in response to questions about
the program. “Because some data of U.S. persons may at times be
incidentally collected in N.S.A.’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 British law.
Two
top-secret flow charts produced by the British agency in 2012 showed
incoming streams of information skimmed from smartphone traffic by the
Americans and the British. The streams were divided into “traditional
telephony” — metadata — and others marked “social apps,” “geo apps,”
“http linking,” webmail, MMS and traffic associated with mobile ads,
among others. (MMS refers to the mobile system for sending pictures and
other multimedia, and http is the protocol for linking to websites.)
In
charts showing how information flows from smartphones into the agency’s
computers, analysts included questions to be answered by the data, like
“Where was my target when they did this?” and “Where is my target
going?”
As
the program accelerated, the N.S.A. nearly quadrupled its budget in a
single year, to $767 million in 2007 from $204 million, according to a
top-secret analysis written by Canadian intelligence around the same
time.
Even
sophisticated users are often unaware of how smartphones offer spies a
unique opportunity for one-stop shopping for information. “By having
these devices in our pockets and using them more and more,” said
Philippe Langlois, who has studied the vulnerabilities of mobile phone
networks and is the founder of the Paris-based company Priority One
Security, “you’re somehow becoming a sensor for the world intelligence
community.”
Smartphones
almost seem to make things too easy. Functioning as phones to make
calls and send texts and as computers to surf the web and send emails,
they both generate and rely on data. One secret report showed 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.
Detailed Profiles
Such
information helps mobile advertising companies, for example, create
detailed profiles of people based on how they use their mobile device,
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.
The
N.S.A. and the British agency busily scoop up this data, mining it for
new information and comparing it with their lists of intelligence
targets.
One
secret British document from 2010 suggested that the agencies collected
such a huge volume of “cookies” — the digital traces left on a mobile
device or a computer when a target 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 said.
Document
From Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters
This document from May 2010, redacted in places, is one
of several undisclosed classified documents provided by Edward J.
Snowden, the former N.S.A contractor, and shared by The New York Times,
The Guardian and ProPublica.
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 N.S.A. 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 said.
(In December, The Washington Post, citing the Snowden documents, reported
that the N.S.A. 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 included
the computer code needed for plucking 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
secret report noted that the profiles vary depending on which of the ad
companies — which include Burstly and Google’s ad services, 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 like 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 spokeswoman,
said the company had no knowledge of the intelligence programs. “Nor do
we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned,” Ms.
Bergstrom said, referring to the N.S.A. and the British spy agency.
Another
ad company creates far more intrusive profiles that the agencies can
retrieve, the report said. The names of the apps that generate those
profiles were not given, but the company was identified as Millennial
Media, which has its headquarters in Baltimore.
In
securities filings, Millennial documented how it began working with
Rovio in 2011 to embed ad services in Angry Birds apps running on
iPhones, Android phones and other devices.
According
to the report, the profiles created by Millennial contain much of the
same information as others, but several categories that are listed as
“optional,” including ethnicity, marital status and sexual orientation,
suggest that much wider sweeps of personal data may take place.
Millennial Media declined to comment for this article.
Possible
categories for marital status, the secret report said, include single,
married, divorced, engaged and “swinger”; those for sexual orientation
are straight, gay, bisexual and “not sure.” It is unclear whether the
“not sure” category exists because so many phone apps are used by
children, or because insufficient data may be available.
There
is no explanation of precisely how the ad company defined the
categories, whether users volunteered the information or whether the
company inferred it by other means. Nor is there any discussion of why
all that information would be useful for marketing — or intelligence.
Unwieldy Heaps
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 Qaeda in Germany in 2007, and the N.S.A. boasted that
to crack the plot, it wove together mobile data with emails, logins and
web traffic. Similarly, mining smartphone data helped lead to the
arrests of members of a drug cartel hit squad in the killing of an
American Consulate employee in Mexico in 2010.
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 N.S.A. and British databases, the agencies sometimes seem a bit at a
loss on what to do with it all, the documents show. A few isolated
experiments provide hints as to how unwieldy the data can be.
In
2009, the American and British spy agencies each undertook a
brute-force analysis of a tiny sliver of their cellphone databases.
Crunching just one month of N.S.A. cellphone data, a secret report said,
required 120 computers and turned up 8,615,650 “actors” — apparently
callers of interest. A similar run using three months of British data
came up with 24,760,289 actors.
“Not necessarily straightforward,” the report said of the analysis.
The
agencies’ extensive computer operations had trouble sorting through the
slice of data. Analysts were “dealing with immaturity,” the report
said, encountering computer memory and processing problems. The report
made no mention of anything suspicious in the data.
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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