How intelligence agencies (like the NSA) get their data to spy on people? How are they able to get private data that are protected and encrypted?
In: Technology
Generally they don’t even need to the metadata is enough. A hypothetical scenario i saw in an article a few years ago.
Looking at only the data from the phone of the wife of a senator in a tight re election campaign we see it has been messaging the same number regularly for the past year almost every night and these two numbers are frequently connected to the same mobile phone mast when the senator is out of town. Abruptly two months ago this communication stopped and on the same day the wife’s phone was noted to be in a telephone call with an abortion clinic and that same phone was connected to a mast in the same area as that clinic a few days later.
The messages and calls in the above scenario were all encrypted and inaccessible yet the metadata is more than enough for us to safely assume what was going on and possible to use it to influence the result of the hypothetical upcoming election.
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