The NSA isn’t just tracking online communications — new documents unveiled from the Edward Snowden leaks indicate that cell tower communications around the world are being tracked in real time by NSA operatives, without any legal groundwork or due diligence/due case. Documents in the archive suggest that U.S. location data acquisition is so routine that many companies have it built into their training manuals at this point.

On the heels of the scandal, dozens of new initiatives have popped up to develop new anti-surveillance or privacy tools to offer protection against snooping. The archives suggest, however, that the NSA system is so elaborate and sophisticated that the efforts are fruitless. It’s capabilities to track mobile locaiton are so well established that efforts at communications security are futile.

‘They operate on the full universe of data in the NSA’s FASCIA repository, which stores trillions of metadata records, of which a large but unknown fraction include locations.’

via Washington Post