The National Security Agency (NSA) tracks locations and movements of millions of cellphones outside the U.S. to gather suspicious travel patterns, which means that you can run from the agency but you can never hide.
According to the Washington Post, the NSA tracks and collects around five billion cellphone records outside the U.S. each day from taps on fiber optic cables and other communication channels that connect cellphone traffic globally. The large amount of data is also saved to track a very small number of phones. U.S. officials told the Post that the programs used to collect the data do not violate any law and are strictly used to track foreign intelligence targets.
NSA's data collection process was revealed by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, who leaked a classified documents of the agency.
The NSA is said to acquire a substantial amount of data on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones, which means tapping information of millions of Americans who travel abroad along with their cellphones.
Per reports, an American carrying his cellphone outside the country can be tracked potentially anywhere in the world and the agency can retrace any of their movements and expose any threats to the nation's security..
Even though the NSA claims that it collects data of cellphones outside the U.S., a previous report suggests that the agency actually carried out a secret test project in 2010 and 2011 to obtain huge amounts of information on the location of Americans' cellphones even inside the U.S. Moreover, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, also confirmed the test program but explained that the project was never put in practice.
Tracking of telephone calls has been a normal practice to get to know of the location of a suspect who is involved in a criminal activity. However, collecting and analyzing data of millions of customers traveling outside the country, at an extensive scale, to find suspicious activity of just a few may definitely raise privacy concerns amongst people traveling outside the U.S.
