A Little (Angry) Bird Told the NSA What You’re Up To

[The Straight Story]

You may not think that the NSA would care about the games you play on your smartphone, but a new batch of documents from the spy agency suggest otherwise.

Both the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, are capable of getting personal data from phone apps, reporters at The New York Times and the investigative journalism site ProPublica revealed today.

Included in those documents is code written by the security agencies that specifically targeted Angry Birds. In addition to age and gender, the code could also get information about the smartphone user's sexual orientation and marital status, the report found. A spokeswoman for Rovio, the group that developed Angry Birds, said that the company had no knowledge of the intelligence programs.

In a written response to The New York Times and ProPublica, the NSA said the agency "does not profile everyday Americans as it carries out its foreign intelligence mission.”

“Because some data of U.S. persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA's lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process,” the agency added, noting that similar protections exist for “innocent foreign citizens.”

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/angry-bird-told-nsa-youre/story?id=22251583

[BlueStreak]

1. I weep for our younger generations

They have never seen what happens with nations ramp up their police states. They have little knowledge of the great wars of the 20th century and exhibit very little curiosity for their history in general. They are perfectly happy put the most minute details of their lives into the public domain, as if there can be no consequences.

This is the end game of the Military Industrial Complex. War machines that aren't really seen by the public and therefore don't really require much buy-in from the public.

Everybody just remember, the only thing separating you from a real terrorist in terms of the government's use of the data against you is a FISA court that is completely, inescapably secret.

We would be a much smarter nation if the military draft were compulsory. The M-I-C made that mistake in the 1960s and they will never do that again.

SO here were are, happily playing on our cell phones while .. (you can fill in the rest of that sentence.)