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The NSA Is Collecting Lots of Spam

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-tax-dollars-at-work dept.

wiredog writes "One side effect of the NSA's surveillance program is that a great deal of spam is getting swept up along with the actual communications data. Overwhelming amounts, perhaps. From The Washington Post: '[W]hen one Iranian e-mail address of interest got taken over by spammers ... the Iranian account began sending out bogus messages to its entire address book. ... the spam that wasn't deleted by those recipients kept getting scooped up every time the NSA's gaze passed over them. And as some people had marked the Iranian account as a safe account, additional spam messages continued to stream in, and the NSA likely picked those up, too....Every day from Sept. 11, 2011 to Sept. 24, 2011, the NSA collected somewhere between 2 GB and 117 GB of data concerning this Iranian address."

6 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. SPAM is a way to hide a message in plain sight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    and you never know if the SPAM are actually a broadcast messages with certain keywords carrying the instructions for their coordinated attacks. May be the typos contains letters to form hidden words too?

    1. Re:SPAM is a way to hide a message in plain sight by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Or, maybe its shows a new vector for an anti-NSA attack by the Iranians.

      Fuck the Iranians, I'm signing up for everything.

      Everything.

      Every.

      Thing.

      We will choke them to death on our spam.

      --

      ---
      ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
  2. So it's come to this by FuzzNugget · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Spam is actually doing something useful. Enemy of my enemy and all that.

  3. Serves 'em right by themushroom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you're gonna go snooping through people's stuff, you're bound to find a lot of garbage.

    --
    Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
  4. Re:LOL by crakbone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It really does not mean much. With deduplication a terabyte of spam would be next to nothing.

  5. Re:Spam - the perfect cloak by Nivag064 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    During the second world war, in New Zealand, someone was tasked with reading laundry lists over the radio. Hidden in ththis was coded information for secret agents, embedded observers, and the like. They may have told something like: listen for private Scotty's list at 1605 hours and do this if he has 3 pairs of underpants washed, do this if it is 5 pairs, and also this if his green shirt was starched...

    So it would be a near certainty that agencies in a lot of countries use spam to communicate to deep cover agents. Tens of thousands of people might have spam about a particular brand of viag... that has a coded message for selected agents - but those agents who read the spam could not be distinguished from non-agents.

    I am sure that the NSA, and other agencies (not just in the USA) have programs to try and sort out the spam to detect this - which is yet another type of arms race. How do nyiou know some is a message & not straight spam???