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."

Comments

Power Corrupts

[Nyder]

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.

Re:Power Corrupts

[jythie]

The tricky part is, how to roll it back. One of the reasons that the government is the way it is, is, well, they get the votes. Politicians are not stupid (even though they often seem so) and are mostly filled with self interest. They generally only do what keeps themselves and their in-group in power, and much of that comes down to being sensitive to what the majority of voters want.

In other words, our government is a reflection of its citizens, the government ha not forgotten that the US is made of citizens, it is a distilled representation of them. Unfortunately for us the voter base of the US is a highly conflicted and fragmented society with passionately mutually exclusive ideas about how to do things. In many ways the best way to fix things would be a one time massive tax, split the country up into maybe half a dozen or dozen countries, and pay moving expenses to anyone who wants to migrate to the region that best represents them. Much of the rottenness comes from our deeply conflicted philosophies, which I am not sure there is any way to reconcile.

Of course it also does not help that so much of the population are arm-chair economists (or other such things) who believe that their basic idealistic understanding of problems (where they do not have to deal with the complexities or consequences) is more valid then people who spend decades examining them, so people passionately vote about things they do not actually understand all that well but really strongly believe that they do.

Which is probably why so many fictional worlds go with guild-style governments where representation is built around professions rather then geographic regions.

Third-degree websurfing

[Anonymous Coward]

"THEIR CRIME IS CURIOSITY"

Everybody, visit wikileaks now!

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Everybody, visit wikileaks now!

[cdrudge]

I think it's safe to presume that you, as well as every other internet user, were already under surveillance to some degree even before this story was published.

You don't get it yet, do you?

[msobkow]

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.