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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the NSA could still easily fingerprint some users:

1) Find the first edit made by a user

2) Search for IP sockets with a spike in outbound traffic to Wikipedia at around the same time (editing a large section submits a large POST).

3) Follow the users' further edits, and do the same as above to keep narrowing the candidate IPs down.

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I don't think they're so worried about edits. Wikipedia is a go-to source for quick lookups of information.

I work in a nuclear physics lab; if the NSA is watching, I'm sure that some of my searches have triggered flags. Doesn't help that the physics community is small, and everyone is only a few degrees of separation apart.

The NSA could probably identify anyone on the internet given enough time and resources. I think the point of this is to make mass surveillance difficult, so they'll only target people flagged as suspicious instead of everyone.

IIRC, I read elsewhere that they can only store data for the last 24 hours. Simply, because so much data comes through the pipes.

So, unless they already had decided to keep an eye on you, your traffic would probably have gone unnoticed. Switching to a VPN now or something would keep you relatively anonymous.

On the other hand, switching to a VPN would make them flag your data (encrypted) and retain it longer (though you'd probably still be fine).

> IIRC, I read elsewhere that they can only store data for the last 24 hours.

the XKeyScore slides are 5 years old. who knows what they can do now.

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