India fifth most snooped country by US, Pakistan second

India ranks among the fifth most snooped country in the world under the controversial NASA snooping program "PRISM", exposed recently, which is bound to cause alarm and consternation in New Delhi.

Interestingly, the extent of NASA's surveillance of Indian communication traffic is greater than its electronic snooping efforts in China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

ALSO READ: India gets new system to counter cyber attacks

According to a Guardian report, Iran was the country where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered, says the newspaper, with more than 14 billion reports in that period, followed by 13.5 billion from Pakistan.

India clocks in fifth with 6.3 billion pieces of information collected from the country's computer and data networks in one month.Jordan and Egypt are the third and fourth most intensively watched countries.

The Guardian describes as a top secret NSA "global heat map" gives an insight into the sheer volume of data being collected by America's most secretive intelligence agency: In March 2013 alone, it harvested a whopping 97 billion "pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide."

The newspaper has reproduced one of the NSA's colour-coded "heatmaps," according to which countries are more extensively monitored. The colours range from green, for the least amount of surveillance, to yellow, orange and finally red for those subjected to the most surveillance. India is coded orange. The extent of the NSA's surveillance of Indian communication traffic is greater than its electronic snooping efforts in China, Russia and

Saudi Arabia.