By Fran Berkman From Mashable

The NSA collects nearly 200 million text messages per day through a secret program called Dishfire, according to a new report in The Guardian. The agency described the collected messages as a “goldmine to exploit” for all kinds of personal data.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the dragnet message collection program. The NSA uses these messages to extract the senders’ and recipients’ personal data such as location information, financial activity and contact details, according to the report published Thursday.

SEE ALSO: Edward Snowden: Mission Accomplished, ‘I Already Won’

An NSA slide describing Dishfire from a June 2011 presentation reads, “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit.” Another slide describes it as a “rich data set” and “high impact” because “usage is increasing,” specifically referring to notifications sent to mobile devices from companies such as airlines, healthcare providers and banks.

James Ball, a special projects editor for The Guardian and author of the report, tweeted an image of a top secret document that shows the type of information the NSA was able to gather from the 194 million messages it collected during just one day in April 2011.

Image: Charles Dharapak/Associated Press (Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., questions Gen. Keith Alexander about NSA surveillance as he testifies before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Capitol Hill on June 12, 2013.)

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See iNews Cayman related story published January 17 2013 “Obama announces NSA programs overhaul” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/obama-announces-nsa-programs-overhaul/