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EFF Reports GHCQ and NSA Keeping Tabs On Wikileaks Visitors and Reporters
sandbagger writes in with a story about U.S. and British government interest and involvement with journalists visiting the Wikileaks website. "The Intercept recently published an article and supporting documents indicating that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ surveilled and even sought to have other countries prosecute the investigative journalism website WikiLeaks. GCHQ also surveilled the millions of people who merely read the WikiLeaks website. The article clarifies the lengths that these two spy organizations go to track their targets and confirms, once again, that they do not confine themselves to spying on to those accused of terrorism. One document contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices discuss whether to categorize WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor" for surveillance targeting purposes. This would be an important categorization because agents have significantly more authority to engage in surveillance of malicious foreign actors."
And Absolute Power Corrupts, mainly those who use "Secret Courts" and "National Security" as tools to get the power they want.
Yes, our government is rotten. The Congress critters, the Senators, the White House. They have failed us on mainly levels. They all need to be impeached and we need to get new peeps in there who remember that the United States is made of of it's citizens, not the corporations.
Be seeing you...
... Keeping Tabs ON Wikileaks Visitors...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
The more I read the news the more I feel like I fell asleep after playing too much Deus Ex back in year 2000 and simply never woke up again. I wonder which levels of paranoia writers will have to appeal to in the coming decades to out do reality.
"THEIR CRIME IS CURIOSITY"
If you read carefully all information on this topic the you will conclude that all visits to all websites are recorded by IP address, and this information is kept for ever. There are multiple and overlapping spying programs for that. In fact, every IP address has a profile, such as IP address 123.456.78.90 in requested period (such as a year) has visited following websites google (904 times), cnn (850), amazon (49), espn (545), facebook( 490), vevo (450), youtube (689), slashdot (365) etc. This profile of every IP address has it's own fingerprint, which is basically modified statistical distribution of the websites visited. There are even patents filed which allow identification of individual only by this fingerprint. Obviously, if you are visiting websites such as wikileaks, democracynow or any other that are designated as "malicious", your IP address is automatically flagged. What the slides show is duplication of efforts as a preventative measure to have a second, independent and precise record of visitors so that when the future whistle blowers will provide information, it will be easier to trace down to the origin. The real action, however, is not a collection itself, but what later happens with the data collected. You would be fool not to assume that analysts are not further analyzing the data and making conclusions. If, for example, someone from us military IP (or IP associated with miliatry) would start sending gigabytes of data, that someone would most certainly be getting extra attention.
Let's all go and visit wikileaks now, just to produce more noise in their statistics. Even better, visit wikileaks from different machines (home, work). Set up a cron job to "test network connection" by fetching a page from wikileaks every hour, on some old idle server at some random customer site...
of I go to wiki an lukup leak I get nsa injested? this is not the french way!
Fixed that for you ;-)
This part of the summary made me pause:
Nowhere can I find any indication that the mandates of the NSA, GCHQ, MI5, MI5, the CIA, the FBI (or any other of the organisations usually linked in these stories) are limited to anti-terrorism duties alone - it may form a large part of their activities, but its not their sole purpose.
Putting everything else aside, that part of the article is ridiculous.
Their defininition of 'journalist' in this case differs somehwat
from the one Miranda saw fall short against him the other day.
*waves to his agent at the services*
Yes, NSA, we're watching you too.
r(r)eda thanks moms. creation is so sleek, meeting our needs without us even having to ask... more new clear options on the way... what a gig
The best description of NSA and GHCQ to date.
Anybody could be a terrorist if global pressures, governmental stupidity, and corporate greed cause them to snap.
Anybody.
So they're not "exceeding their mandate." You just don't realize that even John Q. Milquetoast is a potential terrorist.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
...all know their secrets have been Hoovered up by the NSA during a decade of mining. Why else do you think there has been such a muted response to Mr. Snowden's discoveries? J Edgar was never really challenged either; most timidly waited until he died.
Read the post and you can see the flaming arse that wrote this has an agenda.
It is 100% false that "millions of people who merely read the WikiLeaks website" are being targeted.
Another typical slashcrap report.
I'm almost certainly on one of their lists somewhere then. Makes me feel kinda important.
- Mathematician and computer scientist.
- Special personal interest in cryptography, peer-to-peer networking, etc.
- Wikileaks visitor back in the early days. Not since the Julian Assange junk, though, it has to be said. Can't stand the guy.
- I keep looking at MI5 / GCHQ jobs in the papers and on their website, and their online competitions, but far too peace-loving to actually apply to be one of them. That's gotta flag me for something, surely.
- User of Tor, Bittorrent, Bitcoin, etc.
- Anti-war.
- Like to speak my mind on subjects like the treatment of Turing, why we deal with terrorists so stupidly (what we do that's stupid, what we don't do that's more sensible, and how a dedicated terrorist with the slightest bit of brain could do something much more scary and much more easily than trying to smuggle explosive liquids onto a plane), why America still has people in Guantanamo Bay without fair trial, etc.
- Reader of Bruce Schneier, etc.
- Always telling people about my mad father-in-law who's worked in Kuwait, the US, etc. and somehow manages to get thrown out of every country he goes to (hint: It's not advised to start a ballroom dancing class in a country where women and men aren't allowed to touch).
If they are even bothering to look at who goes on Wikileaks, I must have at least a little log file with some of my online movements in it somewhere for all of the above, surely. Gosh. I feel privileged. Wonder if anyone has even done background checks / political allegiance checks etc. on me.
That said... who cares. It's their job. The fact that I even KNOW about it (or the EFF does) means that they are more shit at it than they should be.
No, they were discussing how to cover their asses if it was found out. "Malicious foreign actor" is a nice excuse, because you could spin anything so it fits the description.
Then they can bomb them out of existence.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
TFT says GHCQ, but TFS accurately says GCHQ. I'm surprised no one else noticed.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
terrorists, and has been doing so for decades. Maybe they just hate the competition.
They don't like wikileaks, or its peers. They also track things like visits to cryptome. They look for risk by people who go to sites that teach the substance of the anarchists cookbook. There are "finger-prints" or eigenvectors of site visitation that they associate with higher and lower risk. If you visit sites a,b, and c, then you are just a harmless teenager making a prank. If you visit sites a, b, not-c, and d, then you might be a threat.
You aren't suprised that the evil empire doesn't like that Snowden aired its laundry, are you? This is the entirely expectable reactive reaction to attempt to "close the barn door". These folks have not read "Godel, Escher, Bach" and understood that the system of themselves is a "sufficiently complex one" and there are axiomatic holes. Either they have to refute the fundamentals of the fundamentals of mathematics - things that drive why 1+1 actually equals 2, or they have to deny they are sufficiently complex, or they have to have a non-lawyers approach to the problem. Their boss and his appointees are lawyers - they can't step outside that box, so they can't actually plug the holes, but they can make a plausible case before a jury of technical idiots that the holes are closed. Sad. Expectable.
A better question is the cadence of the next disclosure. There is a cyclicity to the phenomena. They haven't asked why, because they haven't spent much time looking at cyclicity.
And yet these folks are given trillions of dollars and tasked with the responsibility of keeping the world a good place and making it a better, healthier, more life-full place. Irony. That right there, is irony.
It's a business model. Spend war money to train terrorists, then ask for and spend more war money to eradicate terrorists in a way that breeds more terrorists. Vicious cycle, more money gets perpetually sent towards the businesses that profit from war.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Even ... OMG PONIES (Page 32.)
Actually, if you poke at the publication dates of any of the surviving YouTube entries (upper right) with the date at which an AAA game was released (speculation based on the number of platforms in the lower right), you could probably figure out the date the author used when punching in the query to retrieve the displayed data, and what event happened that day to cause a spike in brony-related traffic.
(Of all the places I least expected to see EqD... Hat tip to an author with an unintentional sense of humor :)
The NSA...asked other governments without First Amendment protections to prosecute journalists?
Ummm, I want someone to go to jail, but it sure as hell ain't journalists.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Angela Merkel has been outspoken about her distrust for the US since various revelations came to light within the last year. By definition, then, she is both "malicious" and "foreign." Are you suggesting that we take out Germany (again)? Or is it just more painfully obvious that the word "malicious" is being misused and instead of actually being being used as "dangerous" it is instead a nice-sounding cover for "people whom we don't like?"
Why wouldn't they keep tabs on visitors since wikileaks poses a threat to national security.
... does this mean a DDoS attack on Wikileaks would leave the spooks chasing their own tails?
. If you were a malicious foreign actor, would you start with wikileaks?
No. I'd start with the mapping of the supply roots. Wikileaks is functioning as a packaged outrage for the people and politicians. If I'd be a someone seeking to arrest a malicious actor who I think is thinking this outrage package is practically useful information for a great patriotic struggle in the Eastasia, I'd inject some selected misinformation to the system and tip off the people I'm interested about, leading them to a controlled situation.
"Those who do no evil suffer not when they are Wikileaked." -- ancient proverb from the distant, democratic past.
a psyop to make people think that they have a choice. The CIA rigs elections in foreign countries. Do you think they haven't done it here? They have. And there is proof of presidential electronic vote tampering here within the past 20 years.
Someone needs to make a site that outs and tracks every employee of the NSA. I bet they would like that.
I really now EXPECT to see those responsible for this criminal behaviour facing their day in court. This is clearly illegal by and standards, and undermines the whole foundations of British democracy. I still hold some hope that their is enough of a democratic system left in Britain, to deal with the perpetrators of these crimes. This is a hope I sadly don't hold for American citizens, given the pathetic state of the regime there. If the British police do not act against these criminals, then it will be clear evidence that the police and judiciary are either suffering corrupt, or completely subservient to a powerful and corrupt regime, that is an enemy of the British people. The scene is now set for a significant and important trial. If government ministers knew about these crimes, then they should resign immediately, and offer their apologies. It is wholly unacceptable, that any democratic government, should be spying on the habits of their own citizens, particularly with regards to viewing materials, such as those posted on Wikileaks, which have played an important part in revealing the depth and breadth of criminality in important parts of the state security apparatus. Obviously, the institutions responsible, must now be disbanded, and reformed from scratch. New leadership is needed. Leadership that will respect the rule of law. Leadership that believes in the rights of its own citizens. What has happened within the security apparatus of the United States and Britain, is on par with a terrorist attack on our countries. It completely undermines the right to a free society. Using 'terrorism' as an excuse is pathetic. If 'terrorism' is the reason for these crimes, then the terrorists have already won. They have succeeded in destroying our democracy, and in the process, have created a new enemy - our own apparatus of state - an enemy far more powerful, better resourced, more ruthless, and more underhanded, than any terrorist. Most terrorists are pathetic religious fundamentalist halfwits, who pray on primitive fears. The state is behaving in a similar way. It is praying on fears to justify its ends. It is persecuting those who stand up to its repression. Today, I am ashamed to be British.
The government is doing things for which there are even patents? Wow. I had no idea.
Geez, with IPv6 giving every single web client a distinct address, you'd think the NSA would be campaigning behind the scenes to have their carefully curated fat-pipe monopolists ramming IPv6 down our collective throats.
And damn, what a surprising patent, with only about a thousand years of prior art.
I guess that cuts both ways.
PS: Notice our fine Slashdot Classic buggering poor Mr l'HÃpital.
Dammit, boycotted for ten days. Came back. Rolled Beta. Fucking Arrrg. At least adding it to host files made it go classic. Dice is not listening. Been here since chips and dips. When beta is the only option I'm out for good. Removed my resume from dice for good measure. Killing the golden goose. Short-sighted mba fucks.
""And Absolute Power Corrupts, mainly those who use "Secret Courts" and "National Security" as tools to get the power they want.
Yes, our government is rotten. The Congress critters, the Senators, the White House. They have failed us on mainly levels. They all need to be impeached and we need to get new peeps in there who remember that the United States is made of of it's citizens, not the corporations.""
The FBI, CIA, Pentagon, ect.. were spying on US citizens long before the NSA or GCHQ. You have a [what I would call} a communist dictator in the Federal government which according to the constitution is illegal. The media/press are to blame as well since they do nothing but peddle propaganda, without finding any real truth behind why the US government or in many cases the federal government is pushing such ridiculous BS. And its only when a majority of citizens or a few journalist bother to figure it out, does the media/press bother to report it, and when they do, they use sensationalism and pretend as if no one knew or figured it long before they bothered to report the truth. [or at least there version of what they think is truth].
You go back to the people that were involved in creating the country's Democracy and they were for the most part yuppies, or business tycoons, so its not surprising that corporations and the wealthy still make the rules and laws that favor them. The very people that most hail has the forefathers were the same as today's politicians, even they broke they supposed constitution. You have to explore these people, beyond they myths they teach in schools, and on TV to find out they're no better.
Yet another A.C. Troll maintaining deniabilty.