NSA: The Involuntary Social NetworkLily Dane Since 2010, the NSA has been gathering that social networking data on Americans and compiling it into intricate graphs like this one: There doesnt seem to be any restriction on the types of data collected or from whom it is collected. This network is supposed to be used to track the data of foreign nationals, but Americans can get tangled in the web if they are linked to a suspects social connections. PowerPoint presentations and memos from the agency detail how the NSA has been able to develop software and other tools to reveal as much information about individuals as possible. One document cited a new generation of programs that revolutionize data collection and analysis. Some facts about this newly-revealed spying program: 1) The NSA is developing a metadata repository that can take in 20 BILLION record events every DAY and this information will be available to analysts within an hour, according to a 2013 budget document disclosed by Snowden. 2) There are multiple collection programs and databases, and they rely on both domestic and international metadata. 3) One of the main tools used for chaining phone and email records is called Mainway. Significant amounts of data originating in the United States goes into this system. 4) An internal NSA bulletin stated that Mainway was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from an unnamed American service provider under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows for the collection of the data of Americans if at least one end of the communication is believed to be foreign. 5) Budget documents revealed by Snowden show that the NSA is putting a lot of effort and money into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion record events daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes. 6) The budget includes $394 million for an Enterprise Knowledge System, which is designed to rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale, according to a 2008 document. This data is automatically computed to hasten queries and discover new targets for surveillance. 7) Better Person Centric Analysis is a top-secret document that describes how the agency searches for 94 entity types, including phone numbers, e-mail addresses and IP addresses. In addition, the NSA correlates 164 relationship types to build social networks and what the agency calls community of interest profiles, using queries like travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs. 8) An internal briefing paper from the NSA Office of Legal Counsel showed that the agency was allowed to collect and retain metadata and content about U.S. persons for up to five years online and for an additional 10 years offline for historical searches. Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, told the New York Times: In essence, the government is building a detailed database of our daily lives. But they are just looking out for our best interests, right? Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. Her goal is to help people to Wake the Flock Up! 