<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Barton Gellman, with whose work Bob Woodward has a problem because Robert Redford once played Woodward in a movie or something, shares a by-line today on the latest revelations regarding the oddly mistake-prone, all-too-human heroes of our intelligence community. Once again, it appears, accidents will happen. The NSA does not target Americans&amp;#039; location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones &amp;quot;incidentally,&amp;quot; a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result. One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said &amp;quot;we are getting vast volumes&amp;quot; of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year. There is, as always, no cause for concern here at all. U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets. Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said &amp;quot;there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.&amp;quot; Once again, the real Snowden Effect is that we can no longer have the alibi that we don&amp;#039;t know what our government is doing in our name. We have the choicenow to use that knowledge to bring political pressure to bear for the purposes of reining in the surveillance state. Or not. Whatever the surveillance state does going forward, it does with our general complicity and our tacit consent. And so are they all, all honorable men. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19953/nsa-tracking-cell-phone-locations-120513/>