I actually posted about this a while back here on HN, having figured this out when attending a course on SS7 signalling several years back. At the time i thought it was a 'theoretical possibility'<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682320" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682320</a>
What I'm enjoying about these documents is that they reveal the 'correct' amount of paranoia.<p>If you're pretty technical, it's easy to simulate what the NSA does with your imagination. Just imagine what databases they have, and imaging what you could do in a limited way if you made it your side project. Badabing.
So, basically, Google's location history is NSA's HAPPYFOOT data aggregator.<p><a href="https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/" rel="nofollow">https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/</a>
What's disturbing is that even though they <i>know</i> which data is from US citizens, they still won't discard it, and can even use it. I mean, maybe I can understand if they "incidentally" collect the data of some people - although doing that for tens of thousand of people a year is really pushing it since all sorts of people could be in that "incidental" collection, and US persons could actually be targeted this way, and then masked as being "incidental collection".<p>But even after they know they are Americans, they still keep it? That's just unacceptable. This other story puts things in an even scarier perspective, because of what they can do with that data if it gets trickled down to other agencies (parallel construction, etc:<p><a href="https://www.aclu.org/meet-jack-or-what-government-could-do-all-location-data" rel="nofollow">https://www.aclu.org/meet-jack-or-what-government-could-do-a...</a>