NSA 'tapped 60m Spanish phone calls' as country joins France and Germany in latest Snowden revelations - by Adam Whithnall

Spain has become the latest major European country to learn that its citizens have had their phone calls intercepted by the US’s National Security Agency (NSA), according to new revelations from Edward Snowden published this morning.

According to reports in the newspaper El Mundo, the NSA secretly monitored 60 million Spanish calls in the space of a single month.

Though the contents of conversations were not recorded, US spies took details of the so-called metadata - the information on who, when and where each call was made.

Similar to news from France and Germany last week, these allegations also come from documents provided to journalists by fugitive NSA contractor Snowden.

Today’s El Mundo front page carried the name of Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who worked on that paper’s series of stories about the NSA’s mass surveillance schemes.

He teased the news yesterday, tweeting: “A new large country tomorrow morning will learn how many millions of its citizens have their communications data intercepted by the NSA.”

Read more: NSA 'tapped 60m Spanish phone calls' as country joins France and Germany in latest Snowden revelations - Europe - World - The Independent

Intelligence Programs: Forget the NSA: This MIT Website Just Needs Your Gmail to Track You - by Claire Groden

Metadata is a word that was once reserved for the halls of high-tech companies and academia. But since the revelation of mass surveillance programs by the National Security Agency (NSA) — which collect troves of big-picture data on American citizens — the concept of data about data has entered the public lexicon. Now, the techies over at MIT’s Media Lab are giving us a glimpse at our own metadata, giving us a cold, hard look at the bread crumbs of personal data we freely scatter across the Web.

Much like the government phone-surveillance programs, Immersion doesn’t need to access the content of communications. Instead, by gathering information about the senders and recipients of all the e-mails in an inbox, it can create a detailed portrait of the user’s social connections. Each person’s picture on Immersion is as unique as a fingerprint, but much more informative. 

Read more: Forget the NSA: This MIT Website Just Needs Your Gmail to Track You | TIME.com