Whut.

NSA and GCHQ target 'leaky' phone apps like Angry Birds to scoop user data:

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.

...Scooping up information the apps are sending about their users allows the agencies to collect large quantities of mobile phone data from their existing mass surveillance tools – such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks – rather than solely from hacking into individual mobile handsets.

Exploiting phone information and location is a high-priority effort for the intelligence agencies, as terrorists and other intelligence targets make substantial use of phones in planning and carrying out their activities, for example by using phones as triggering devices in conflict zones. The NSA has cumulatively spent more than $1bn in its phone targeting efforts.

...The documents do not make it clear how much of the information that can be taken from apps is routinely collected, stored or searched, nor how many users may be affected. The NSA says it does not target Americans and its capabilities are deployed only against "valid foreign intelligence targets".

Oh, well, that's okay, then. (No it's not.)

I honestly do not even know what to say anymore. The breaches of privacy are so vast and so utterly overwhelming and so pervasive that I feel like all I have left is resignation. "So they're basically just as aggressively invasive as anyone's worst fears ever could have been? Oh."

I don't feel good about that. But that's all I got.

I feel more powerless in response to the surveillance state than pretty much anything else.