Everyone and their grandma knows about the lengths that the United States’ National Surveillance Agency will go to in order to remain the agency with the most widespread database in the world.

Although there has been months of international discourse about the various programs of the NSA and their breaches of privacy, as of recent there has been discovered a database built up by the NSA in which almost five billion mobile location records are logged in on a daily basis letting the agency map movements and actions in unimaginable ways.

Information about this database was found when leaked to The Washington Post by infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden. The papers went on to say that this programme has accumulated close to 27 terabytes of data for the agency and potentially surpasses any other NSA programme in terms of its breach of privacy.

The American Civil Liberties Union said that “it is staggering that a location-tracking program on this scale could be implemented without any public debate”. However, this week, debate and outrage wasn’t limited to protest through web statuses. A U.S. federal district judge Richard Leon, ruled the NSA’s mass spying programme unconstitutional and deemed it to be an “arbitrary invasion”. Leon may be referring to a clause in the fourth amendment the United States’ constitution that specifically states that unreasonable and seizure by the government is a breach of citizen’s trust.

By: Aishwarya Moothan