Use encryption? NSA says you might be a terrorist!

michel · Postby **michel** » Sat Jul 05, 2014 12:15 am

"The former NSA director General Keith Alexander stated that all those communicating with encryption will be regarded as terror suspects and will be monitored and stored as a method of prevention, as quoted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in August last year. The top secret source code published here indicates that the NSA is making a concerted effort to combat any and all anonymous spaces that remain on the internet. Merely visiting privacy-related websites is enough for a user's IP address to be logged into an NSA database."

"Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic."

"The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey."

"• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates' use of computers;

• Penetrating the security on delegates' BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;

• Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;

• Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

• Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow."

"IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE, YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR"

Taken from http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/ ... 20-summits

- Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by the NSA.

- Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users WORLDWIDE are tracked by the NSA.

- Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.

- The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called "the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of the Linux Community", and calls it an "extremist forum".

"The NSA program XKeyscore is a collection and analysis tool and "a computer network exploitation system", as described in an NSA presentation. It is one of the agency’s most ambitious programs devoted to gathering "nearly everything a user does on the internet." The source code contains several rules that enable agents using XKeyscore to surveil privacy-conscious internet users around the world. The rules published here are specifically directed at the infrastructure and the users of the Tor Network, the Tails operating system, and other privacy-related software."

"The former NSA director General Keith Alexander stated that all those communicating with encryption will be regarded as terror suspects and will be monitored and stored as a method of prevention, as quoted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in August last year. The top secret source code published here indicates that the NSA is making a concerted effort to combat any and all anonymous spaces that remain on the internet. Merely visiting privacy-related websites is enough for a user's IP address to be logged into an NSA database."

"An examination of the XKeyscore rules published here goes beyond the slide presentation and provides a window into the actual instructions given to NSA computers. The code was deployed recently and former NSA employees and experts are convinced that the same code or similar code is still in use today. The XKeyscore rules include elements known as "appids", "fingerprints", and "microplugins". Each connection a user makes online - to a search engine, for example - can be assigned a single appid and any number of fingerprints."

"This code demonstrates the ease with which an XKeyscore rule can analyze the full content of intercepted connections. The fingerprint first checks every message using the "email_address" function to see if the message is to or from "bridges@torproject.org". Next, if the address matched, it uses the "email_body" function to search the full content of the email for a particular piece of text - in this case, "https://bridges.torproject.org/". If the "email_body" function finds what it is looking for, it passes the full email text to a C++ program which extracts the bridge addresses and stores them in a database.

"The full content of the email must already be intercepted before this code can analyze it. XKeyscore also keeps track of people who are not using Tor, but who are merely visiting The Tor Project's website, as this rule demonstrates:"

Taken from the news article http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/nsa230_page-1.h

Postby **Julia Pseudo** » Sat Jul 05, 2014 2:32 am

Yeah yeah I heard about this on reddit when it was released and it's pretty goddamn draconian. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't really surprise me. Thankfully there are way too many people who use TOR for the NSA to actually actively track them.

Mable · Postby **Mable** » Sat Jul 05, 2014 7:31 am

Nothing to hide? Well fuck that they sure watch this forum aswell and think we already are terroists.

Now to be serious this whole NSA Spy thing has going on for so long but it's just completly bullshit. Humans have their rights for a private life but with this all of the stuff you do is watched. Facebook, Mobile, SMS you proberbly can't meet with friends because you being watched cause they might think you plan a Let's rob the bank thing.

Postby **Raster** » Sat Jul 05, 2014 8:16 am

I'm not affected by the NSA surveillance at all, so I don't really care.

michel · Postby **michel** » Sat Jul 05, 2014 12:55 pm

Raster wrote:I'm not affected by the NSA surveillance at all, so I don't really care.

that's what they want you to think

TLtimelord · Postby **TLtimelord** » Sat Jul 05, 2014 12:59 pm

michel wrote:
Raster wrote:I'm not affected by the NSA surveillance at all, so I don't really care.
that's what they want you to think

For the general population. You have nothing to hide that could potentially get you in trouble on counts of terrorism, right? If not, then this won't affect you.