US, British spies use ‘Angry Birds’

US and British spy agencies routinely try to gain access to personal data from Angry Birds and other mobile applications, BBC News says, citing a report.

A National Security Agency (NSA) document shows location, websites visited and contacts are among the data targeted from mobile applications.

It is the latest revelation from documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

In a statement, the NSA said it was not interested in data beyond "valid foreign intelligence targets".

"Any implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is focused on the smartphone or social media communications of everyday Americans is not true," the statement said.

The report, published by the New York Times, ProPublica and the Guardian, said the NSA and Britain's GCHQ have worked together since 2007 to develop ways to gain access to information from applications for mobile phones and tablets.

The scale of data gathering is unclear.

But the reports suggest data is gained from a variety of mapping, gaming and social networking applications, using techniques similar to the ones used to intercept mobile internet traffic and text message data.

The documents also reveal the two agencies are increasingly convinced of the importance of mobile applications data.

The joint spying programme "effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system" one 2008 document from the British intelligence agency is quoted as saying.

Another GCHQ report, in 2012, laid out how to extract information from Angry Birds user information from phones on the Android operating system. The game has been download 1.7 billion times across the world.

The British spy agency said it would not comment on intelligence matters, but insisted that all of its activities were "authorised, necessary and proportionate".

Another NSA document described a "golden nugget" - a perfect scenario where NSA analysts could get broad selections of information from the applications, including networks the phone had connected to, documents downloaded, websites visited and "buddy lists".

Other applications mentioned by the documents include the photo-sharing site Flickr, movie-based social network Flixster and applications that connect to Facebook.