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Comment by GHFigs | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I read it, and I stand by what I said. The article explains a set of rules used to filter a set of information out of another set, but it does not support claims about what is done with that set of information.

There is a lot of insinuation, but no example of any individual user of Tor or reader of Linux Journal, etc. being monitored or tracked simply for doing so.

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You can always demand even more proofs, but it's not probable that they'll come easily -- it's obvious that such leaking is extremely dangerous. This is still significantly more that public knows now than it knew before the article.

It makes more sense to me that they actually use these in AND statements. For example, uses TOR and searches for JIHAD could be traffic that would be interesting. If I had to guess, the Linux Journal stuff was just something a geek put in there during testing.

That's what I thought—these rules obviously aren't the entire pipeline, and the results obtained from them may or may not be interesting in and of themselves.

That said, using Tails probably does increase my XKeyScore rating. Is there anything published as to the scale of the rating? Something along the lines of "Once you get a rating of (say) 500, we're gonna come and beat down your door, wife and dog, and not necessarily in that order".

There's no indication that there is such a rating exists, or that any such decisions are made based on automated rules. It's a tool for selecting some traffic out of all traffic, not for replacing human analysis or decision-making.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKEYSCORE

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