The odds that you have played angry birds at one point or another is pretty high, considering the game has been downloaded an estimated 1.7 billion times worldwide. The game and the ever-in-the-spotlight National Security Agency have come under fire recently when it was revealed in documents released by Edward Snowden that the NSA has been gathering data through the game.
Angry Birds isn’t the only app that the NSA has been collecting information through. The NSA and its British intelligence counterpart have been able to collect all sorts of personal information from many so called “leaky” apps like Google Maps, Flickr, Twitter and others.
The data, according to NBC News, “could be examined to determine a phone’s settings, where it connected to, which websites it had visited, which documents it had downloaded and who its users’ friends were.”
The NSA’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, said it would not comment on intelligence matters—that all of its activity was “authorized, necessary and proportionate.”
As the National Security Agency scandal continues to heat up, and Edward Snowden continues to release the unsavory secrets of the NSA, more people are beginning to ask questions about the secretive organization. Although the agency insists that they are not interested in people who are not “valid foreign intelligence targets,” many are wondering why and how they manage to collect and control so much information about Americans daily lives.
As the courts continue to dispute the constitutionality of the program, releases like this from the whistle-blower Edward Snowden help to fuel the debate on what kind of privacy people should and shouldn’t expect their government to respect.
With an estimated 1 billion smart phones in the world, the information that intelligent agencies all over the world have access to via “leaky” apps is astounding. As the public learns more and more about the tactics of the NSA and the sort of information that they control, hopefully the outcry against such domestic spying will be big enough to put a stop to the agencies Orwell-esque way of business.