Use Tor, Get Targeted By the NSA

An anonymous reader sends this news from Ars Technica: "Using online anonymity services such as Tor or sending encrypted e-mail and instant messages are grounds for U.S.-based communications to be retained by the National Security Agency, even when they're collected inadvertently, according to a secret government document published Thursday. ...The memos outline procedures NSA analysts must follow to ensure they stay within the mandate of minimizing data collected on U.S. citizens and residents. While the documents make clear that data collection and interception must cease immediately once it's determined a target is within the U.S., they still provide analysts with a fair amount of leeway. And that leeway seems to work to the disadvantage of people who take steps to protect their Internet communications from prying eyes. For instance, a person whose physical location is unknown—which more often than not is the case when someone uses anonymity software from the Tor Project—"will not be treated as a United States person, unless such person can be positively identified as such, or the nature or circumstances of the person's communications give rise to a reasonable belief that such person is a United States person," the secret document stated.'"

Comments

Good for the economy.

[nospam007]

So we just need to write a Spam Generator that sends out billions of encrypted stuff to US-citizens to create government jobs?

Nice!

Re:Good for the economy.

[drfred79]

I'm intending to write BOMB a script that will add random Red Flag words to my emails OBAMA at random intervals in bold so NUKE everyone can continue to read my emails normally TERRORIST but the government will start getting inundated with my AL QAEDA schemes.

Re:Good for the economy.

[Dunbal]

Undermining national security. LOL. What does it feel like to see a threat in every shadow? Everyone is out to get you huh? Careful, the Democratic Republic of the Congo might just get the upper hand and de-stabilize the US before invading it!

Seriously, by fundamentally changing what the US stands for over the last 20-30 years, you have undermined your own national security. There isn't anything left worth fighting for.

Re:Good for the economy.

[ArcadeX]

you forgot the truly evil words like REDUCE TAXES, CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT, BALANCED BUDGET, NEW IDEAS, and everything else that scares the gooberment

Re:Good for the economy.

[Virtucon]

Uhm, No
Actually TOR is many things including downloading (AFAIK you can't do torrents though but maybe you can) but it's also for folks who fear reprisals from their governments or for people who don't want their activity tracked for whatever reason. The people who set up TOR do it to promote the freedom and anonymity in the use of the Internet. Yes it's that tool for all those dirty old men out there looking for hookups on Craigslist while at work.

There was an incident last year where an unsuspecting TOR exit node host was charged for the activities of their anonymous users in his local country. So the folks who support TOR (financially, hardware or act as hosts) don't take it lightly so people who use it shouldn't take it lightly either.

TOR is a great tool but you can also set yourself up with a SOCKs proxy very easily say on Amazon AWS (or any other cloud service) meaning, your encrypted traffic would go to their data center and exit out whatever local network pipe they use. It's not as sophisticated as TOR, where multiple hops are used but at least with Amazon's recent statement, they may resist secret demands for your info. You could also set up cascading tunnels of tunnels but meh, I'm already probably in some file somewhere with the FBI or the NSA just for saying you can do this. I guess I shouldn't mention I have a copy of the "The Anarchist Cookbook" should I? Crap I better burn it now. Oh crap, you can get it on Amazon anyway, so I guess they're now suspects.

Re:Good for the economy.

[PrivacyXpert]

What is human right and human freedom that USA Government have been actively accusing other countries of lacking whereby they are spying on their own people in their own backyard? Its a disgraceful joke

Re:Good for the economy.

[H0p313ss]

What is human right and human freedom that USA Government have been actively accusing other countries of lacking whereby they are spying on their own people in their own backyard? Its a disgraceful joke

You can't handle the truth.

They've been doing it for decades through their intelligence partnerships with various NATO allies. The predecessors of these systems were already in place, the post-9/11 paranoia allowed them to ramp it up to unprecedented levels all over NATO.

For example, Canada has the same rule, a Canadian agency cannot spy on Canadians without specific legal orders. However the U.S. can spy on Canadians, and Canada can spy on Americans. Quid quo pro.

As soon as you have a covert agency in any country is will find some way to dirty itself because most of the time they cannot discuss their operations with politicians.

Re:Good for the economy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, wow. Where to begin?

"eth0" doesn't live at /dev/eth0. It's not a character device. You can't just write a stream of bytes to it and expect them to appear on the wire. If you somehow could, the result stream of bytes would look nothing like ethernet packets, and all you would succeed in doing is wreaking havoc on your LAN. Your router wouldn't be able to understand anything it saw, and would transmit none of it to your ISP.

Also, mathematically, true random data can't be compressed. In practice, that holds true for the output of your pseudo-random number generator too. I.e. why the heck are you using "compress"?

Furthermore, on most modern unixes "/dev/random" consumes entropy from your kernel's entropy pool. If the level of entropy available gets low, reading from it will block until more random data is available. Unlike /dev/urandom, /dev/random will not generate more pseudo-random output on demand. That means that running the above command will make any process on your system that uses /dev/random (i.e. all active SSH sessions, HTTPS connections, etc.) hang. The entropy pool is replenished from various physical sources - such as the number of microseconds between incoming packets, keystrokes, etc. - but not quickly enough if you run the command you suggested. (At least, not unless your motherboard has a hardware entropy source. They exist, but they're rare.)

You really didn't think that comment through much, did you?

Re:Good for the economy.

[ragefan]

Undermining national security. LOL. What does it feel like to see a threat in every shadow? Everyone is out to get you huh? Careful, the Democratic Republic of the Congo might just get the upper hand and de-stabilize the US before invading it!

Seriously, by fundamentally changing what the US stands for over the last 20-30 years, you have undermined your own national security. There isn't anything left worth fighting for.

The truth is, the US. Government is scared because they have been doing things that the people wouldn't approve for decades. They are scared because they know the house they built is coming down around them, and people are getting tired of it. They are scared because they know when we get sick of it and find out all shit they been doing, we are going to come down hard. They are trying to keep us from doing anything.

Come down hard?! Hmm, no. The American people will continue to ignore what the U.S. government does as long as they keep Hollywood pumping out new episodes of "Ouch! My Balls!" If the American people really gave a fuck, then a Congress with 16% approval rating would be wiped clean rather than the majority of incumbents be re-elected.

Uhm, guys?

[waddgodd]

Given the recent revelations about the NSA dragnets of literally every single email, call, text, and pretty much any other form of electronic communication, it's pretty much a given that the best way to attract the NSA's attention is fog a mirror.

non-issue

[TCM]

You are supposed to use HTTPS only over Tor anyway and transmit no identifying data in other cases, respectively. Tor already assumes the existence of such an adversary as the NSA, so what's the story here?

Anyone else notice a pattern?

[spacepimp]

They keep stretching the parameters and scope of what they can do. Of course that is only after they have been caught lying about the scope to begin with. Does anyone still believe them? I imagine quite soon they will start declaring that they need to have a back door to all encryption just in case you might do something wrong.

Re:Anyone else notice a pattern?

[OffTheLip]

Are you sure they "keep stretching the parameters and scope" or are we just learning the scope and depth of what they have already been doing?

It's Worse Than You Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Combining the fragments of leaked information that are now public related to the NSA's programs and the legal authorities affirmed by the FISA courts and Attorney General Eric Holder, it's clear that the US government's surveillance apparatus has the potential to monitor a significant portion of US citizens' communications.

Several reputable reports, including PBS' Frontline and NOW, have detailed the construction and operation of telecommunication interception facilities such as Room 641A. These types of facilities, which were deployed by 2003 and revealed to the general public by 2006, provide the NSA with the opportunity to access a large volume of telecommunications traffic. To use an analogy, imagine that several major mail sorting hubs in the US had "secret" rooms controlled by the NSA that all mail passed through.

A significant portion of Internet traffic is encrypted. Online banking, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc. utilize standard SSL encryption to provide security. To continue the analogy, while some internet traffic is unencrypted in much the same way that postcards are mailed all the time with their messages clearly visible, many "sensitive" online communications such as the aforementioned banking and social networking services encrypt communications, similar to the way that sensitive mail communications like bank statements are usually sent in envelopes and not on postcards.

It is not politically palatable to suggest that US government agencies can and should surveil US citizens' telecommunications in any indiscriminate fashion, and there is no clear legal authority that would permit them to do so. In an interview with Charlie Rose that aired June 17, 2013, President Barack Obama said "...if you're a U.S. person then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it's not targeting your e-mails unless it's getting an individualized court order."

Under the original provisions of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the US government does have authority to conduct surveillance of communications without a court order if the parties communicating are not United States persons. More recent amendments to FISA since September 11, 2001 have expanded the government's authority to conduct surveillance.

It can be difficult to identify the geographic origin of telecommunications traffic. Tor, Virtual Private Networking, and Internet proxies provide ways for Internet users to "hide" their return addresses. There are all sorts of legal, legitimate uses for these technologies. For example, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is widely interpreted to require hospitals to use encryption technologies such as Virtual Private Networks to protect confidential medical information if it is transmitted electronically between medical facilities.

It is also incredibly difficult to determine the nationality of a user of a telecommunications network. For example, two non-US persons could be visiting the US and using a telecommunications network in the country or a US citizen could utilize a telecommunications network when traveling outside the US.

There's an area where it helps to extend the envelopes vs. postcards analogy a bit: encryption is, in some ways, more like mailing a letter in a combination safe where only the sender, receiver, and safe company know the combination. The whole point of encryption is that it secures communications in such a way that even if someone intercepted an encrypted message, they couldn't read it unless they knew the secret combination to decode it.

This leads to a couple of questions:

1. If the US government is trying its best to restrict its surveillance to non-US persons, what does it do if it accidentally intercepts and reads communications from a US person?
2. If a large volume of telecommunications traffic, particularly traffic that is of interest to the US government, is encrypted (e.g., in opaque envelopes/combination safes without return addresses), how is it possible for t

Here's the catch,

[Anonymous Coward]

" Where the NSA has no specific information on a person's location, analysts are free to presume they are overseas, the document continues."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant

encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

use TOR to send copies of 1984

That's the point of Tor.

[Hatta]

Yes, using Tor is going to attract attention. That's why we need as many people as possible to use Tor, to decrease the signal to noise ratio. If you have nothing to hide, you should be using Tor to help protect those who do.

Completely Off the Rail at Section 5.2

[bill_mcgonigle]

yeah, the encrypted data bit is interesting (who doesn't use opportunistic TLS on SMTP these days?) but here's the bigger problem:

Section 5 -- Domestic Communications (U)

A communication identified as a domestic communication will be destroyed upon.
recognition unless the Director (or Acting Director) of NSA specifically determines, in writing, that: (S) ...

(2) the communication does not contain foreign intelligence information but is
reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed such communication may be disseminated (including United States person identities) to appropriate Federal law enforcement authorities, in accordance with 50 U.S.C. l806(b) and l825(c), Executive Order No. 12333, and, where applicable, the crimes reporting procedures set out in the August 1995 "Memorandum of Understanding: Reporting of Information Concerning Federal Crimes," or any successor document. Such communications may be retained by NSA for a reasonable period of time, not to exceed six months unless extended in writing by the Attorney General, to permit law enforcement agencies to determine whether access to original recordings of such is required for law enforcement purposes; (8)

That's it, no questions left, the NSA is involved in domestic surveillance of US Citizens for law enforcement purposes. It's as if the Church Committee never existed.

Considering the ease of writing those two required letters and the current state of law breaking in the United States, it's easy to see how bureaucrats could take the guidelines as written and 'reasonably determine' that all domestic communications need to be stored in perpetuity.

Assuming anything else is to assume a level of generosity and restraint on the part of the intelligence agencies that each day we find ourselves more foolish to do.

"Inadvertent"

[Vainglorious Coward]

NSA agents are not allowed to eat cookies. However, they may take items from the cookie jar and place them in their mouths to determine whether they are cookies. Any cookies which are inadvertently swallowed may be retained.

Re:Read article on TOR, get targeted

[ducomputergeek]

After 9/11 there were things done that made sense such as equipping airliners with armored cockpit doors, not allowing knives or axes or chainsaws in carry on, but collectively we should have kept a stiff upper lip, rebuilt the damn towers 1 story higher and said "It's going to take more than that to change us". Instead we went whining and cowering to the corner and those seeking more power ceased the opportunity telling us "they'd make us safe". I've read that line in enough history books to know whenever those in power start making that claim, bad things happen. Really bad things.

If you want to live in a free and open society the consequence of such is that sometimes people do bad things. That is the price of such a society. I think in my parents and certainly my grand parents generation they understood this. I put a lot of people off when I say this: but 3000 people die when bad guys crash planes into buildings. Well maybe we should look at things like the cockpit doors and explore air marshal programs. But the Patriot Act? No thanks. If it means 3000 people have to die now and then compared to having to live in a surveillance state, then so be it. 3000 people have to die. It's the price of the very freedoms we claim we so desire. So when bad guys do bad things, lets as a society help those directly effected the best ways we can, but we're never going to be safe. It's a dangerous world. And we as a society in the US don't seem to want to wake up to that reality.

Now I look around and wonder if Hobbes wasn't right: people are stupid and need to be ruled over by Kings. Because that what it seems like people have been "wanting" these past 12 years...