Feature Creep

The NSA's reach keeps expanding as seen by the Washington Post blurb titled 

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

As a techie, I view this news as a perfect example of feature creep where an enterprise like the NSA just extends their ability to spy on us by breaking into the switches of the Verizon's of the world to, in this case, track our cellphone locations, with little extra effort as this mirrors the same approach of ISP network switch hacking the NSA uses to ingest email, banking and social networks data as needs warrant.

Seen below is a network diagram showing a typical connectivity diagram courtesy Wikipedia.