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Comment by prof_hobart | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to believe that this is all it takes (or if it is, why they aren't just including everyone).

Tails is hardly an uncommon word, with a meaning entire devoid of any terrorist connection.

And so is Tor - it may not be that common elsewhere, but tor means "rock on top of a hill" and various places have it in their name. I've stayed the High Tor hotel in Derbyshire before, and as it was to see a fireworks festival they may have spotted various picture of explosions that I posted - I wonder if that set any triggers off.

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> And so is Tor - it may not be that common elsewhere, but tor means "rock on top of a hill"

"Tor" is also the German word for "gate" (the common term, not something exotic), so I assume it's quite safe to discard the claim as bullshit.

Simple keyword recognition à la "He said Treadstone! Track him down!" only happens in movies. If a one-man startup can develop the technology to analyze a bunch of packets to and from a person and determine whether he is interested in rocks on top of hills or the anonymization tool, I'm sure the NSA can do even better.

It's a pretty basic and obvious problem with keyword searching and data reduction that will have been solved a long time ago. A very simplistic model would have words like 'Tor' and 'Tails' increment an 'interestingness' counter, along with other terms like 'Bomb', 'Jihad' and so on. Once the counter passes a threshold, you look at the messages. As I said, this is basic stuff, there are much better and smarter ways to do this. In fact, there are entire large companies that exist to write software that carries out searching of data by keyword; Google springs to mind!

Do all these people writing 'I searched for Glastonbury Tor, now I'm on a terrorist watch-list, stupid NSA, Hah!' really believe that they system works like that?

> Do all these people writing 'I searched for Glastonbury Tor, now I'm on a terrorist watch-list, stupid NSA, Hah!' really believe that they system works like that?

It gets better, they believe NSA is devilishly competent when it serves their argument that NSA is simply out to oppress the populace, but then simultaneously believe NSA is so foolish as to waste a bunch of time tracking non-threats who happen to trip over enough keywords.

Double-think: It's not just for the Party leadership.

Not seen many people on the "NSA are evil" side arguing that they are devilishly competent.

You should pay more attention then, since that's the argument used for why NSA in particular is a threat and not allied foreign intelligence agencies like BND. Seriously, I've had someone tell me that BND is no threat because they're derived from an ineffective West German intelligence agency instead of the very good East German equivalent.

If NSA were incompetent they'd be a sideshow and no threat at all.

> why they aren't just including everyone

They are. At least, that's my takeaway from the Snowden revelations. They are just using various and overlapping justifications for it, e.g., Schneier's notion of robustness of NSA surveillance programs [0]. The NSA's goal is to collect everything from everyone. Therefore, they want to use the broadest and most expensive justifications and criteria for collection.

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_t...

Keep in mind search engines often know what link you click on, and NSA probably also monitors which site is subsequently visited pursuant to a keyword search.

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