‘NSA mainly spied on ordinary internet users’

In recent years, the NSA has mainly spied ordinary internet users, according to a study. 89 percent of internet users whose data was tapped were ordinary citizens who are not listed as suspects.

So reports The Washington Post, which conducted a survey of 22,000 wiretapping reports containing about 160,000 communications conducted with 11,400 user accounts. This includes e-mails or messages via social networking sites. The documents, supplied by Edward Snowden, cover data from 2009 to 2012. According to the US newspaper, only 11 percent of user accounts tapped by the NSA belonged to individuals known as suspects.

That means that 89 percent of the user accounts were tapped without the intelligence service having concrete suspicions. The Washington Post states that it is “by-catch in a net that was stretched for others.” The activities are said to have led to the arrest of two terrorists who were involved in bomb attacks.

Details have already come out about the wiretapping of internet users without concrete suspicions. For example, the NSA would target internet users looking for information about Tor or the anonymity-oriented operating system Tails. The NSA’s goal would be to divide Internet users into two groups: those who have the technical knowledge to browse the Internet anonymously and those who do not. The first group’s communications should be completely intercepted.