NSA collecting address books

At an event in Russia last week, leaker Edward Snowden alleged, via The Washington Post, that the NSA has been slurping the contents of some 250 million electronic address books a year.

"These [surveillance] programs don’t make us more safe. They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and to live and be creative, to have relationships, to associate freely," said Snowden.

According to The Washington Post on Monday, one such program is a scheme that sees the NSA collect the contact books associated with widely used email services, such as Hotmail and Gmail, and instant-messaging clients such as Yahoo! Messenger.

This data is grabbed as it passes over major internet transit points, therefore it doesn't need to make an official request for the information.

Snowden said: "There's a far cry between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement, where it's targeted, it's based on reasonable suspicion and individualized suspicion and warranted action, and sort of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything, even when it's not needed."

The footage of his speech appeared on Democracy Now.