Widespread Cell Phone Location Snooping by NSA?

[RoyGBiv]

(Sorry if this is a dupe. Did a search and didn't find anything.)

Via CNet:

Exclusive: Widespread cell phone location snooping by NSA?
Posted by Chris Soghoian

If you thought that the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping was limited to AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, think again.

While these household names of the telecom industry almost certainly helped the government to illegally snoop on their customers, statements by a number of legal experts suggest that collaboration with the NSA may run far deeper into the wireless phone industry. With over 3,000 wireless companies operating in the United States, the majority of industry-aided snooping likely occurs under the radar, with the dirty-work being handled by companies that most consumers have never heard of.

A recent article in the London Review of Books revealed that a number of private companies now sell off-the-shelf data-mining solutions to government spies interested in analyzing mobile-phone calling records and real-time location information. These companies include ThorpeGlen, VASTech, Kommlabs, and Aqsacom--all of which sell "passive probing" data-mining services to governments around the world.

ThorpeGlen, a U.K.-based firm, offers intelligence analysts a graphical interface to the company's mobile-phone location and call-record data-mining software. Want to determine a suspect's "community of interest"? Easy. Want to learn if a single person is swapping SIM cards or throwing away phones (yet still hanging out in the same physical location)? No problem.

More . . . .

[crimsonblue]

1. Considering the NSA measures their supercomputer abilities

by the acre-- as in they have hundreds, maybe thousands of acres, and therefore many hundreds of thousands of square footage of computers-- I think this would be pretty easy for them. All they have to do is just toss all voice data through their superservers and wait for the voices to match with someone they have in their database. Then, BAM, they start surveillance on the target that just popped up. Awesome, isn't it?