Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes. But the president focused largely on the NSA's collection of the metadata from US phone calls and made no mention in his address of the large amounts of data the agency collects from smartphone apps. 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. "Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned [NSA and GCHQ]." GCHQ’s cable-tapping and internet buffering capabilities , codenamed Tempora, were disclosed by the Guardian in June, but the new documents published by NBC from a GCHQ presentation titled “Psychology: A New Kind of SIGDEV" set out a program codenamed Squeaky Dolphin which gave the British spies “broad real-time monitoring” of “YouTube Video Views”, “URLs ‘Liked’ on Facebook” and “Blogspot/Blogger Visits”. 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.
– When you fire up Angry Birds, Google Maps, or a host of other popular smartphone apps, you're opening yourself up to government spies. The NSA and its UK counterpart, the GCHQ, have been actively intercepting the data that "leaky" apps collect from users, according to a new leak from Edward Snowden, published by the Guardian, New York Times and Pro Publica. Depending on the app, the spies can skim data including your location, marital status, sexual orientation, political alignment, ethnicity, and education level. Angry Birds, which has been criticized in the past for collecting excessive data for advertisers, is listed as a case study on the GCHQ's internal wiki. Another document boasts that anyone using Google Maps is effectively "working in support of a GCHQ system." And an NSA briefing slide describes a target uploading a photo to social media as a "gold nugget," from which their location, contact lists, and "a host of other social working data" can be gleaned. The scale these capabilities has been used on isn't clear, and the NSA responded to the report by saying it doesn't spy on "everyday Americans" or "innocent foreign citizens." Other tidbits from the report: The NSA refers to its various smartphone tracking tools as Smurfs. A program that can turn microphones on, allowing spies to eavesdrop on targets, is called "Nosey Smurf," while another enabling it to turn on a powered down phone is called "Dreamy Smurf." The NSA and GCHQ have a database of every mobile phone tower in the world. According to one GCHQ doc, advertising cookies "are gathered in bulk, and are currently our single largest type of events."