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.

Not only Wikileaks Visitors are counted

[Anonymous Coward]

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.