India among Top 5 Nations under U.S. Surveillance

Bangalore: India is one of the top five countries that are widely monitored by U.S. intelligence services, as per reports. According to UK’s Guardian newspaper the U.S. National Security Agency collects an astounding 6 point three billion pieces of computer data from India each year. The U.S. seems to collect data from what is called unfriendly countries and hence India’s name on the list comes as a shock. However, it is not yet known whether the Indian government has cooperated with U.S. intelligence in collecting the data.

India emerged as the fifth most tracked country by the U.S. intelligence which used a secret data-mining programme to monitor worldwide internet data.

The Guardian newspaper claims to have acquired top secret documents about U.S.' National Security Agency's (NSA) data-mining tool, called Boundless Informant. The tool details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA "global heat map", shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide, the daily reported.

(With PTI inputs)

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