As part of a major facial recognition effort, the New York Times reported that the NSA is collecting millions of photos each day from electronic communication.



The NSA harvests about 55,000 that it considers to be “facial recognition quality.”

The report goes on to state that “it is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort.” It further states that current US privacy and surveillance laws don’t specifically protect against the use of facial recognition technology to identify individuals.

The agency refused to say whether it collects photos from social media “through means other than communications intercepts.” NSA still needs to get court approval to collect images from American citizens.