Everyday millions of people fuel their selfie addiction by posting images of their mugs to social media sites. Well, everyday the National Security Agency is collecting millions of those same images to fuel its facial recognition program. So it’s a good chance those selfies you think are private have been intercepted, The New York Times reports.
According to top-secret documents obtained from former agency contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA has been intercepting emails, text messages, social media posts, and other forms of communication to harvest images, over the last four years. Of those captured, about 55,000 are high quality images that can be used in their programs. Agency officials say those images are being used along with other records in an effort to gain a total picture on intelligence targets around the world.
Under the Obama administration, the NSA has accelerated technology that can match faces contained in agency databases to those suspected of being potential threats to the safety of Americans. Documents cited the arrest of two international suspects that attempted bombings while in America as motivation to intense those efforts.
[Image: Shutterstock]
NSA spokeswoman Vanee M. Vines defended the program saying, “We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies.”
Vines did not release figures on how many images have been collected or people affected by the technology, but declined to answer whether the program collects facial images from social media like Facebook.
But for those concerned about their personal images being collected, the technology has been in use for years. Facial recognition software is used by state and local law enforcement to identify suspects. Those departments use images from from driver licenses, passport photos, and foreign visa applications. In addition, law enforcement has been known to use social media outlets, Facebook and Twitter, to gain information about suspects.