NSA DISHFIRE Program Collects Nearly 200 Million Text Messages Daily Worldwide

The Guardian, citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revealed that the National Security Agency was collecting almost 200 million text messages per day from around the world through a program codenamed DISHFIRE. According to the leaked documents from 2011, the program collected “pretty much everything it can” from global SMS traffic, storing the messages for later analysis regardless of whether the senders or recipients were intelligence targets.

The DISHFIRE program was paired with an analytical tool called PREFER, which processed the collected SMS messages to extract valuable intelligence including: contact information from missed call alerts, location data from roaming and travel notifications, financial information from bank transaction alerts, passport and visa details from travel confirmations, and names and contact details from electronic business cards. The leaked documents showed that DISHFIRE even recorded geocoordinates for 76,000 sent messages during the documented period.

The NSA defended the program in a statement, saying “DISHFIRE is a system that processes and stores lawfully collected SMS data” and claiming it was used exclusively for valid foreign intelligence purposes. However, the sheer scale of collection—nearly 200 million messages daily—inevitably swept up communications of American citizens traveling abroad or communicating with foreign contacts, raising significant Fourth Amendment concerns.

The revelation demonstrated that the NSA’s surveillance extended far beyond phone call metadata to include the content of text messages, which often contain intimate personal information. The British intelligence agency GCHQ also had access to the DISHFIRE database, using it to track targets and map social networks. Privacy advocates condemned the program as another example of mass surveillance that violated basic privacy rights, while the NSA’s claim that it only analyzed a tiny fraction of collected messages did little to assuage concerns about the vast database of personal communications being stored indefinitely. The disclosure added to growing international pressure on the United States to reform its surveillance practices.