The paper, based on a top-secret document leaked by Snowden and an interview with intelligence officials, said the collected records were stored in a database with "at least hundreds of millions of device location information".
The report said the NSA did not intentionally list locals as an object of information gathering, but instead "inadvertently" received a large number of positioning information for U.S. domestic handsets.
One manager told reporters that the NSA had "huge" positioning data by connecting cables to the global mobile network, which served both American and foreign handsets.
U.S. intelligence officials contacted by Reuters declined to comment on the report.
The report quoted officials as saying that the NSA's actions to collect and interpret location data were legitimate and aimed only at intelligence analysis of foreign targets.
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