The latest revelation coming out of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's leaked NSA documents has emerged. In a Washington Post story published Wednesday, it was revealed that the NSA is tracking cell phone locations -- and globally.

That is bad enough, but the sheer numbers involved makes the report worse. The NSA is gathering nearly five billion records a day on the locations of cell phones around the world. The information comes via leaked secret documents, but also from interviews with anonymous U.S. intelligence officials.

With that much data, the NSA is able to track the movements of individuals, mapping their relationships, in ways that would have been previously only been dreamed of. Still, this sort of idea -- tracking, as well as making the connections between individuals clear -- is why any instance of illicit tracking, such as Apple's oops back in 2011, a big deal.

Notably, the NSA does not target the location data of Americans by design. However, the agency acquires a substantial amount of data on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” according to the report. The use of the word "incidentally" is as a legal term that "connotes a foreseeable, but not deliberate result."

The reason for this "incidental" data is that, as one anonymous senior collection manager -- who, perhaps surprising, spoke with the permission of the NSA -- said, the NSA gets its location data by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally. Those cables serve not just foreign cell phones, but U.S. devices as well.

In addition -- and obviously -- Americans that travel overseas will have their data acquired, as well.

FULL STORY: http://www.examiner.com/article/five-billion-records-daily-the-nsa-...