NSA collecting millions of faces from web images: report

The US National Security Agency, using a new software, is harvesting millions of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programmes, according to a media report.
The spy agency's reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, The New York Times quoted top-secret NSA documents as saying.
Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionise the way that the NSA finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show.

The agency's ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed, the report said.
The NSA intercepts "millions of images per day" - including about 55,000 "facial recognition quality images" - which translate into "tremendous untapped potential," according to 2011 documents obtained from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
While once focused on written and oral communications, the NSA now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

"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" that can help "implement precision targeting," noted a 2010 document.

It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort.
"We would not be doing our job if we didn't seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities - aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies," said Vanee M. Vines, the NSA spokeswoman.
She added that the NSA did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver's licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants.

She also declined to say whether the NSA collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.
The US has charged Snowden, granted asylum by Russia last year, with espionage and revoked his passport.
Leaked documents by Snowden had shown that the US allegedly indulged in phone and internet tapping of foreign leaders that caused an uproar across the world.