The Latest in IT Security

The NSA isnt limiting itself to telephone metadata and email communications. The agency is building a massive database of photos as part of a facial recognition projection to track and identify targets, reports The New York Times. Millions of images are collected per day, according to documents obtained by Edward Snowden, with some 55,000 of facial recognition quality. One presentation explaining the program says It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information to implement precision targeting. Images are likely harvested from social media sites such as Facebook as well as from private communications captured by the NSA.