Dishfire and What Obama Can’t Say About the N.S.A.

“DISHFIRE contains a large volume of unselected SMS traffic,” a says a presentation that was put together by Britain’s General Communications Headquarters, and obtained by the Guardian thanks to Edward Snowden. The volume is very large: close to two hundred million text messages from around the world every day. “This makes it particularly useful for the development of new targets, since it is possible to examine the content of messages sent months or even years before the target was known to be of interest.” The documents go on to say that Dishfire, a National Security Agency program, whose products the G.C.H.Q. was allowed to look at, “collects pretty much everything it can, so you can see SMS from a selector which is not targeted.”

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