Slashdot Mirror
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...
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...
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.
Yes, NSA, we're watching you too.
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.
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.
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
Their defininition of 'journalist' ...
The distinction between "journalist" and "foreign propagandist" often depends on the government that's making the distinction.
Just ask Tokyo Rose.
Depends on what you mean by targeted.
Was their data concerning a website they visited collected without their knowledge? If the article is right, almost certainly.
Was it analysed? Probably.
Were people then sneaking into the back garden going through their trash looking for Julian Assange? Probably not.
Nobody is saying that millions of people were observed to any great detail. What we're saying is that GCHQ et al were looking at data sent by visitors to a particular website covertly. All visitors. Foreign and domestic. Without their knowledge.
If I did that, it'd be a breach of the Data Protection Act at the very minimum. Apparently they are "allowed" to, whether officially or not. But it's pretty certain that they intercepted data intended for a sensitive website without the website/viewers consent.
How much of a problem that is is a matter of interpretation.
If nothing else, this just adds more weight to the "let's anonymise, encrypt and obscure everything" argument.
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.
... does this mean a DDoS attack on Wikileaks would leave the spooks chasing their own tails?
Don't worry - the NSA will do it to you the French way, the Greek way, the English way, and a few ways that you've never heard of as well!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.