If You Do This, the NSA Will Spy on You | Hacker News Reader

If You Do This, the NSA Will Spy on You

defenseone.com

18 pointsgexos9 comments

Okay, let's see what behaviors I should avoid...

> Searching for the Tails, operating system, another Windows alternative popular among human rights watchers, will also land you on the deep-packet inspectee list.

Oops. Too late.

These sort of criteria can't possibly narrow down a set of people enough to justify spying on them. It's like trying to surveil every adult male after a shooting because most shooters are adult men: technically true, and you've eliminated over half of all humans, but most of the people left are still innocent.

Much of what we know about these programs are just from leaked presentation slides from Edward Snowden. That means these are slides made to digest a big process for management or new people.

The slides indicate that they are aware that "turbulence" can occur, and also that they are sensitive to issues of overwhelming data volume and bad signalling. It's also clear that they take multiple factors beyond simple web behavior, such as if you are a foreign language speaker in a region.

Unfortunately we don't know the specifics of this program. We don't really know what exclusionary criteria they use, or what strong inclusionary factors gets somebody tagged for deeper automated surveillance. The factors likely are likely being tuned all the time by engineers and statisticians, like, for example, snooping on Google is probably not easy anymore due to routine HTTPS, so they probably have changed that part of the program.

>the XKeystore source code designates the Linux Journal as an “extremist forum.”

This again? Debunked here: http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/07/validating-xkeyscore-code....

Y'all are always asking for website ideas. How about a kind of "live Snopes" that lets people discuss and debunk reporting on current affairs?

If this is true then you can help by visiting these sites to trigger xkeyscore, and sending links to all your friends and family to click too.

I wonder if I have been targeted. I used TOR a few times, once I tried to use it to look at my craigslist ads because I thought the ads I had had been flagged by other people selling the same sort of items I was selling, but CL was altering what I saw based on IP. Turns out CL blocks TOR and it didn't even help me.

I use Ubuntu as my main operating system, I started that just because I thought it was neat. I don't recall searching for Tails, but I've tried probably close to 50 different Linux distros so I wouldn't be surprised if I've visited the site or at least read articles on it. (I count downloading the ISO and booting it up as a VM and clicking around for 20 minutes as trying one.)

Are you an Islamic terrorist? If not, then no - you haven't been targeted. It's a pretty simple check, at least for a first-order approximation.

It is worth noting this article is from July 2014. Perhaps the title could be updated to reflect this fact.

In the past I was put off by the ads on the Linux Journal. Given the information this article it's probably time to give it a closer look again. It's convenient that the NSA provides guidance on interesting web sites.

I predict that every atrocity that happens in the US will be have a trail of suspicious electronic clues leading up to it, which the NSA should have seen. I don't think their efforts will help us at all.

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