The NSA isn’t limiting itself to telephone metadata and email communications. The agency is building a database of photos as part of a facial recognition projection to track and identify targets. Millions of images are collected per day, according to documents obtained by Snowden.
One presentation explaining the program says "It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information" to "implement precision targeting."
Images are likely harvested from social media sites such as Facebook as well as from private communications captured by the NSA. But the latter would require court approval if domestic communications were targeted.
An NSA spokesperson tells The New York Times that "we would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities, aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies."
She says that the agency cannot access state driver’s license databases nor US passport images. She added that the image collection was separate from the agency’s bulk collection of metadata.