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EFF Reports GHCQ and NSA Keeping Tabs On Wikileaks Visitors and Reporters

Posted by samzenpus on from the lets-have-a-look dept.

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."

18 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Power Corrupts by Nyder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...
    1. Re:Power Corrupts by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2, Funny

      Careful, citizen. Criticizing the President is racist. Trust the government. The government is your friend. Not trusting the President is sedition. Sedition is punishable by twenty years in federal prison. Any citizen that attempts to prove the President is wrong is a Commie mutant traitor.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    2. Re:Power Corrupts by jythie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. Third-degree websurfing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "THEIR CRIME IS CURIOSITY"

  3. Not only Wikileaks Visitors are counted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Everybody, visit wikileaks now! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Everybody, visit wikileaks now! by ketomax · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What about reading this slashdot discussion? Does that put me under surveillance too? Surely, more productive things can be run on these computing resources than looking into my boredom remedies.

    2. Re:Everybody, visit wikileaks now! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      https://wikileaks.org/helloNSA_GCHQ/we_all_know_you_are_watching_and_dont_care.html

    3. Re:Everybody, visit wikileaks now! by cdrudge · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  5. Organisational mandates by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Informative

    This part of the summary made me pause:

    and confirms, once again, that they do not confine themselves to spying on to those accused of terrorism.

    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.

    1. Re:Organisational mandates by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Informative

      it may form a large part of their activities,

      No, it forms a large part of the political excuse to create and fund these entities.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    2. Re:Organisational mandates by FriendlyLurker · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not mentioned in the summary, but ThePirateBay users are also included in that spying. Why do we give billions of taxpayers money to the NSA, GCHQ, MI5, MI5, CIA and the FBI again? Industrial Espionage for a few elite industry groups and to help corrupt politicians maintain power it would seem...

    3. Re:Organisational mandates by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      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.

      Indeed. I'm not sure of the complete history of most of those agencies but weren't a large number of them funded under the principle of domestic counter-intelligence? The NSA has it's history in breaking ciphers of WWI, the CIA espionage of Axis forces during WWII, MI5 heck that was formed on the basis of counterintelligence.

      All of these agencies and others around the world (ASIO was formed to eliminate Soviet spies from the Australian government), were formed on the basis of defending countries from foreign forces. The FBI I think are the only ones which were formed on the basis of domestic law enforcement.

    4. Re:Organisational mandates by inhuman_4 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      A big part of the issue is that some of these organizations shouldn't be doing any of this at all.

      A big part missing the the discussion is that the NSA is a military outfit. It is part of the DoD and its commander is a serving member of the US armed forces. It is the signals intelligence branch of the US military. Their primay mission is ensure secure communications for the US command and control infastructure, and gather intelligence on foreign military powers.

      How did we get from spying on the Soviet Union, to monitoring the phones of every American citizen? As a military outfit they shouldn't be operating in the the US at all. You wouldn't let soldiers patrol the streets acting like cops, so why are thay taking on tasks the rightfully belong on the hands of the FBI? The simple answer is secrecy. Whatever legal games they want to play, at the end of the day they knew that they shouldn't be doing it, so the tasked it to the DoD so they can call it a matter of national security.

    5. Re:Organisational mandates by cold+fjord · · Score: 2

      No, it forms a large part of the political excuse to create and fund these entities.

      Those agencies all existed decades before 9/11, which I expect you knew. Do you want to guess again?

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    6. Re:Organisational mandates by Dunbal · · Score: 2

      Terrorism is just the latest incarnation of the boogeyman, it's always about "defending you" and "protecting you" from (Nazis/Japs/Commies/Soviets/Terrorists/Pedophiles/Eastasia).

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  6. You don't get it yet, do you? by msobkow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. They do this for a number of sites by EngineeringStudent · · Score: 2

    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.