Overview#
DISHFIRE is a covert global surveillance collection system and Government Data Store run by the United States of America's National Security Agency (NSA) and the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) that collects hundreds of millions of text messages on a daily basis from around the world.Each day, DISHFIRE collects the following amounts of data:- Geolocation data of more than 76,000 text messages and other travel information[1]
- Over 110,000 names, gathered from electronic business cards[1]
- Over 800,000 Financial transactions that are either gathered from text-to-text payments or from linking credit cards to phone users[1]
- Details of 1.6 million border crossings based on the interception of network roaming alerts[1]
- Over 5 million missed call alerts[1]
- About 200 million text messages from around the world[3]
A related analytic tool is known as PREFER processes SMS messages to extract information including contacts