IF YOU ARE CONCERNED THAT OUR GOVERNMENT’S NSA,
SSS SECRECY, SURVELLIANCE STATE; HAS FAR EXCEEDED ALL BOUNDARIES AND BANS OF OUR CONSTITUTION; READ THIS!
Web
activists find ways to disrupt U.S. surveillance efforts
"Until this summer, people didn't know anything about the
NSA," said Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University co-director Amy Zegart. "Their own secrecy has come back to
bite them."
Activists
are fighting back with high-tech civil disobedience, entrepreneurs want to
cash in on privacy concerns, Internet users want to keep snoops out of their
computers and lawmakers want to establish stricter parameters.
Some of
the tactics are more effective than others. For example, Flagger, a program
that adds words like "blow up" and "pressure cooker" to
web addresses that users visit, is probably more of a political statement
than actually confounding intelligence agents.
Developer
Jeff Lyon in Santa Clara, Calif., said he's delighted if it generates social
awareness, and that 2,000 users have installed it to date. He said, "The
goal here is to get a critical mass of people flooding the Internet with
noise and make a statement of civil disobedience."
Last week, FBI raids on Freedom
Hosting and child porn distributors took down Tor Mail, a secure email
provider for users of the Tor network. A few days later, secure email
provider Lavabit, which had previously provided whistleblower Edward Snowden
with an email address, closed its doors. Its owner left a cryptic message
stating he’d been forced to choose between betraying the American people and
shutting down. It’s possible that Snowden wasn’t the target — a search warrant for child pornographywas
executed against Joey006@lavabit.com on June 10 — but it’s possible that the
two cases together had an impact on the decision to shut down the service.
The day after
Lavabit closed, Silent Circle announced it would also discontinue its own
secure email client. With multiple vendors dropping out of the race at the
same time that consumer interest in secure email services is heating up, what
are your options?
We’re
going to discuss them, but before we do, there’s a larger point that needs to
be made. If you need secure end-to-end communication, email
is probably the wrong way to do it. This has been driven home with the most
recent leaks from Snowden and the Guardian, which reveal that the NSA has
loopholes (under Section 702) that allow it to retain data gathered on US
citizens and possibly search that data without a warrant. The
documents that have leaked specify that agents are not to do this until
appropriate oversight is in place, but there’s no information on whether the
data was used in this fashion previously or what the current status is.
The problem with email security is
that the email system is designed on to facilitate the communication of any
two people with an email address, even when those two addresses are on
entirely different networks separated by thousands of miles. Emails
themselves must be stored on a server somewhere until retrieved and read. The
requirements of this asynchronous communication are part of what make email extremely
useful, but they make it more difficult to secure. Therein lies the problem —
most of the methods used to make email more secure make it less useful.
Users
can install their own encryption software and encrypt email sent through
services like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, but such methods are only useful if
you’ve exchanged encryption keys with the recipient. These methods aren’t
particularly easy to configure and using them necessitates convincing each
and every recipient of the need for such encryption. These problems are part
of why more people are interested in secure email in the first place. The
NSA’s scope and the secretive nature of data sharing agreements with other
foreign organizations makes it extremely difficult to estimate the degree of
protection offered by using a foreign service.
The
bottom line is this: If you’re going to communicate with someone, and you
need it to be really, really secure, email is probably the wrong
way to go. But given that, what are the options? We went looking for services
that weren’t based in the US, offer end-to-end encryption, and that offer the
option to use your own keys, stored offsite. This last helps ensure that the
email service provider is unable to provide information, even under pressure.
US and Canadian services, like Hushmail,
were not considered.
Keep in mind that foreign countries
are not guaranteed to protect your security.
Germany has some of the strongest
privacy laws and protection methods in the EU, but the German BND and BfV
(foreign and domestic intelligence agencies) both partnered with the NSA and
used resources like XKeyscore.
It’s
imperfect, but such criteria are the best we have. After searching through
online documentation, reviews, technical documents, and security forum
conversations, there are two services that seem to top everyone’s lists:
Countermail and Neomailbox.
Countermail
Countermail is based in Sweden and
offers end-to-end PGP encryption and serves its website from CD-ROM media,
not spinning disks. It claims to be the only provider that provides security
against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Users log in via Java applet, which
is then encrypted “using SHA-1, random IV and 262k iterations. The random
128-bit AES-Key and CBC-IV is also generated, using the Java SecureRandom
CS-PRNG.” That data is then further encrypted using Countermail’s server-side
RSA key. All of this is done inside the Java applet. The cryptography APIs
are part of the open-source “Legion of the Bouncy Castle” project.
Countermail
offers a USB key for session authentication as well. The (presumably)
read-only key contains a 512-bit keyfile that’s combined with your login data
to provide additional authentication strength. You can also run the client
directly off the USB drive rather than inside a browser environment,
decreasing the chance of a MITM attack or browser-based logger. As always, a
system that’s been fully compromised could still be vulnerable to snooping,
but these methods are fairly secure.
Password requirements for
Countermail are fairly loose, the system only requires a 7-digit password.
Max length is 128 digits. It can be used to handle email for a web server,
but Countermail can’t register domains and doesn’t provide actual web hosting
services. You can also add PGP keys of encryption users who don’t have
service with Countermail. All attachments, contacts, and calendar entries are
also encrypted.
Interested
users should note that Countermail doesn’t provide “Lost Password” functions to
certain services, including its “Safebox” password management product
(included in the Countermail package). There’s a free trial for seven days,
pricing tiers start in three-month blocks for $19.99 ($6.33 per month) and
run out to 24 months for $99 ($4.12 a month). The domain hosting package is a
one-time $10 fee. USB keys are $15 for two or $20 for three. The base prices
above are all for 250MB of storage; extra storage is a one-time fee of $29
(+250MB) to $109 (+1750MB, 2GB total).
According to Qualsys’ SSL Labs
evaluation tool, Countermail’s security rating is an “A”. Areview
of the service from May 2012 found that users can download and keep
keys privately if they wish, though doing so risks the complete loss of
access to your email.
Neomailbox
Neomailbox is based in Switzerland and
emphasizes its strong data protection laws. Now, Switzerland isn’t in the EU,
but it has adopted some European Union laws — the extent of which, I’m not
honestly sure. I am leery of reading too much into this, not because EU laws
aren’t strong, but because the fine print in who those laws apply to and
whether or not the US has any quiet agreements with governments about data
sharing are far more important than the letter of the legal code. I think
it’s smarter to use an outside provider than a US company, but I’m cautious
of leaning too much on the “Well, Swiss/EU law says I’m safe” line of
thinking.
According
to Neomailbox, the company scrubs all IP information and can, upon request,
scrub additional information from email headers as well. Hardware tokens are
available for additional authentication capabilities. It looks as though
Neomailbox partners heavily with RITLabs, which develops The Bat email
client. A wide range of email clients are supported, however.
Services like domain email hosting
are available ($15). 1GB of hosting is $49 per year; a 5GB account is $79.95
a year, and 10GB is $109.95 a year. There’s a risk-free trial for 30 days
with a money back guarantee. Neomailbox doesn’t give as much information on
encryption methodology as Countermail but notes that it also relies on
OpenPGP and provides extensive links to OpenPGP tools and compatible email
clients. Anti-spam features and unlimited disposable email addresses are all
part of the service.
There’s
also an “Offshore Privacy Combo” service that appears to combine VPN
capabilities with email. I couldn’t find any reviews of the product, and it
appears to have a 5GB/month limit. Pricing is set at $89.95/year at 5GB per
month, or $69.95 for 500MB.
This full review of Neomailbox dates to 2011, but it gives a
comprehensive overview of the service. According to Qualsys’ SSL evaluation
tool, the Neomailbox server also scores an “A”, though the score total is
slightly lower than Countermail.
Flaws
in the system
Ultimately,
XKCD’s comic on the topic remains the greatest concise example of the
problems with relying on these methods to protect your data. At present, no
US or Canadian system can be trusted for the same reasons Microsoft and
Google can’t be trusted. While their PR states that they “only comply with
legitimate requests,” the NSA’s demands and metadata gathering have been
ruled legitimate. Until that changes, these services have no security value
whatsoever.
It’s not clear if the guarantees
granted by EU law are unilaterally applied to US citizens as well, or if
these precepts are bent when certain government entities come calling. For
that reason, it’s important to move away from email for storing any truly
sensitive communication in favor of synchronous communication systems. While
a full consideration of options is beyond this article, point-to-point
communication via IM is likely safer than any email alternative.
But
the flurry of interest in secure email systems also underscores the degree to
which government secrecy on these programs has damaged the public’s
confidence in them. The NSA has a responsibility to protect the nation from
terrorist attacks, and some of that work necessitates monitoring lines of
communication. Few people would argue that access to email or mobile phone
accounts should be off limits in all cases. But by refusing to have those
conversations until Snowden forced the issue, the government has created a
scenario in which people are deeply concerned about overreach precisely
because the government’s current policies have eviscerated the protection
formerly extended by the 4th Amendment.
These
are policy questions that will have to be resolved long-term.
Now
read: Escaping the
corporate/educational/national firewall with an SSH tunnel, SOCKS proxy, and
PuTTY
PuTTY and SSH
If
you haven’t remotely administered a Unix/Linux-like server before, you
probably haven’t heard of Secure Shell (SSH). Secure Shell is simply a
network protocol that allows for encrypted communication between two
computers — usually yours, and a remote server. “Shell” refers to the
command-line interface (CLI) that is present on almost every kind of
computer, including Mac OS X and Windows. SSH is typically used to securely
access a remote computer’s CLI, but it can also be used to copy files — or it
can be used as a tunnel between your computer and another computer on the
internet.
PuTTY
is an SSH client. You can use it to access a remote CLI, or you can use it to
set up a tunnel — and that’s what we’re going to do now.
Tunneling
When
you type a URL or click a link, a request travels from your computer, through
the local router and modem, over your ISP’s network, across the internet, and
into the remote web server. Your request can be filtered at any stage, but
generally it’s at the local router (the school/corporate firewall) or at the
ISP (traffic shaping, federal censorship).
Tunneling
bypasses the local router, modem, and your ISP’s network, and connects you
directly to the internet. If you’re in China, for example, SSH tunneling all
of your traffic through a computer in America will bypass any national-level
filtering and censorship. The actual act of forcing your web traffic through
another computer (and another port) is calledSOCKS
proxying, incidentally — and you can SOCKS proxy without SSH, but
it’s less secure and more likely to be filtered by your local ISP.
Setting
up a tunnel
This
guide will focus on using PuTTY, which is only available for Windows. There
is a section at the end for Mac and Linux users.
First, download PuTTY (putty.exe). It’s a free, standalone
program that doesn’t require installation — so just make a shortcut on your
desktop or taskbar.
Next,
you need to find a remote Linux server to use as the end point of your SSH
tunnel. You can use a free one (which might involve you jumping
through a few hoops to get an account activated), or you can rent a cheap virtual private server (VPS) for around $5/month (which you
could also use as a development server or BitTorrent
seed box). Either way, you need an SSH account on a remote server,
and the IP address and port that you need to connect to.
Now
open PuTTY and fill in the Host Name and Port. Make sure SSH is selected from
the Connection Type. It should look something like this:….
Kim
Dotcom's Mega is working on a secure, encrypted email service that
promises to include all the functionalities of modern cloud-based services
while keeping messages safe from snooping.
Just several days after encrypted email services
Lavabit and Silent Circle shut down,
citing concerns related to NSA surveillance and government requests for user
data, Mega's
CEO Vikram Kumar confirmed rumors that Mega is developing an encrypted
email service.
SEE ALSO: Is It the Dawn of the Encryption App?
Kumar told ZDnet that the service is still a work in
progress and it's hard to give customers the functionalities they expect from Gmail while also encrypting messages.
"The biggest tech hurdle is providing email
functionality that people expect, such as searching emails, that are trivial
to provide if emails are stored in plain text (or available in plain text) on
the server side," Kumar said. "If all the server can see is
encrypted text, as is the case with true end-to-end encryption, then all the
functionality has to be built client side. [That's] not quite impossible, but
very, very hard. That's why even Silent Circle didn't go there."
Thus, Kumar warned a service from Mega may take some
time. "[It's] exciting stuff, but very hard, so I think it will take
months more to crack it. But Mega will never launch anything that undermines its
end-to-end encryption core security proposition and doesn't work for the
mythical grandmother."
The Mega CEO also praised Lavabit and Silent Circle's
"acts of privacy seppuku." Seppuku is a form of Japanese ritual
suicide to preserve ones honor.
Would you use Mega's encrypted email service? Tell
us in the comments.
7 alternative search sites that respect your privacy
Just
recently, Google updated its terms of use and privacy policy. The goal was to
allow Google to use your name and public photo in "Shared
Endorsements." In plain English, it wants to use you in ads.
So, if you like or "+1" something on Google+,
for example, Google can show your friends that you recommend it if it pops up
their searches. I'm sure Google can expand that in the future to the channels
you subscribe to on YouTube or music and apps you buy in Google Play.
To Google's credit, you can opt out — if you know where
to look. Head over to the Shared Endorsements page, sign in with your Google
account and make sure the option at the bottom is not checked.
Still, it's a reminder where Google's focus is. It's
keeping track of what you do so it can use that information in advertising.
And don't forget that your information is one subpoena away from ending up in
a government database.
But it's not like there's a better alternative for
search, right? Bing and Yahoo do the same thing.
That's true, but those aren't the only alternative
search sites around. Here are some that do the job and take your privacy
seriously.
Take a look at DuckDuckGo. Though it's similar to Google,
it doesn't collect any information about you when you search.
It matches Google Search in features and performance
with a similar simple layout. Its "Goodies" features offer
geographic search, calculators and more. You could literally spend hours
checking out DuckDuckGo's cool features.
Maybe there's just one feature about Google's search you
really can't live without, though. In most cases, you can find search sites
tailored to that feature.
Wolfram Alpha,
for example, runs circles around Google when it comes to research and
calculations. Just type in a question and it can usually figure out what you
mean. You can even upload images to get more information about them.
For quick answers, Blekko is usually easier to use than
Google. Instead of returning advertisers and other iffy results first, it
sends you links that actually answer your question.
The links are even broken down into categories, such as
Top results, Shopping and Latest. You can expand a category to see more of
just what you want.
Blekko is
more private than Google in normal mode. However, I recommend you use its
"SuperPrivacy" mode for maximum privacy. This blocks ads and takes
you to secure, encrypted sites by default. You can turn it on by clicking
"Prefs" in the right corner of the site.
If you like how quickly Blekko gives results, you can
try IxQuick, too. It encrypts your search for
privacy while giving you pre-approved results from other top search sites for
a faster answer. You can rate results to help other searchers find what
they're looking for faster, too.
Are you concerned about search results showing up with
inappropriate content? It happens quite a bit, and — thanks to Murphy's Law —
usually when a child is present. Yippy detects adult content and blocks it
automatically. That makes it great for the family computer.
Google is a popular search provider on tablets and
smartphones, but it isn't the only option. Instead, try Mazoom on
smartphones and Izik on tablets. Both give you
mobile-friendly results first. This helps you save on your data plan and
makes pages load faster.
Of course, search isn't the only thing Google does.
Between YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Google+, Google Play, Google Drive and its many
other services, it could run your whole life.
Finding alternatives for these services means some
serious work and often inconvenience. Plus, most of the alternatives are run
by other major companies that aren't big on privacy either.
Instead, find alternatives for one or two services. Try
using some Google services without logging in to your Google account. While
Google, and other companies, will still record your information, no one
company will have all of it.
How to Get Ahead At the NSA
If
you’re not exhausted by or indifferent to the endless revelations about the
NSA – another week, another codename, another programme to vacuum up and
analyse the world’s communications – then you’ve probably long since drawn a
single general conclusion: we’re all being watched, all the time. You may also
think this is something we sort of knew anyway. Perhaps you see ubiquitous
spying as a function of the post-9/11 authoritarian state, which gathers
knowledge by any means possible in order to consolidate its control, and
which sees us all as potential suspects.
Or
perhaps you think that if the state is going to have a chance of keeping us
safe from bad guys it obviously has to have the latitude to look for them: it
isn’t interested in your research into 13th-century frescoes or cheap tights,
but it needs to monitor all internet activity so that it can detect that rare
occasion when someone searches for the materials to make hexamethylene
triperoxide diamine bombs.
The trouble with both these responses is that they’re answers
to a selfish question: are the spies doing what they’re doing because they’re
interested in us?
Civil libertarians say yes, and that the monitoring must stop; security
advocates say no, not if we aren’t doing anything bad.
The paranoid reaction – that if I use the
word ‘bomb’ in an email to my aunt from the vicinity of a Bali nightclub then
I may find black-suited agents descending on my hotel room – is just an
extreme version of the narcissistic fallacy that someone is trying to see
into my brain.
There are seven billion people on the
planet, and nearly seven billion mobile phones; six billion emails are sent
every hour; 1.2 petabytes of data travel across the internet every minute,
the equivalent of two thousand years’ worth of music playing continuously,
the contents of 2.2 billion books. Even if they don’t get everything – the
NSA claims, with loving wording, to ‘touch’ just 1.6 per cent of global
internet traffic, or about 35 million books’ worth of data a minute – the
spooks have an awful more to be getting on with than worrying about you.
And that’s just the internet.
That the NSA – along with the rest of the Five Eyes, the signals intelligence
agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – has for the past
sixty or so years sought to monitor as many of the world’s communications as
it has been technically possible for it to access is widely accepted.
In
response to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the NSA put out a statement in August to
expand on the public description of its mission, defining signals
intelligence (or SIGINT) – its primary job – as ‘the production of foreign
intelligence through the collection, processing and analysis of
communications or other data, passed or accessible by radio, wire or other
electromagnetic means’. ‘Communications or other data’ that is ‘passed or
accessible’ by ‘electromagnetic means’: that’s anything emitted or received
by a phone, computer, fax, radio, guidance system or satellite, or data that
travels along any kind of cable, whether dedicated to voice signals or
internet payloads or banking transactions or supposedly secure diplomatic,
government and military communications. It’s anything with a pulse.
Asked
last month by a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee whether there was
a limit to the records the NSA could collect, Keith Alexander, the agency’s
director, said: ‘There is no upper limit.’ He was talking about the phone
records of Americans, but since those explicitly fall outside the NSA’s
foreign intelligence remit, and since many had thought that systematically
collecting them was illegal, it went without saying that there was no limit
to its ambition or ability to monitor anything else either.
So the
question has to be not so much ‘Is Big Brother watching?’ but ‘How in hell
can it cope?’
We know
what the NSA’s job is, but we don’t know how it does it. How would you, as a
junior analyst in S2C41, the branch of the Signals Intelligence Directorate
responsible for monitoring Mexico’s leadership, navigate the millions of call
records and pieces of ‘digital network intelligence’ logged from Mexico
daily, in order to find that nugget of information about energy policy that’s
going to get you noticed?
For all
the doom saying certainty of the news stories that have periodically filled
front pages since early June we are still in the dark about most of the NSA’s
actual methods and day to day activities.
The NSA
employs more than thirty thousand people and has an annual budget of nearly
$11 billion; outside its headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland, it operates
major facilities in Georgia, Texas, Hawaii and Colorado, and staffs listening
posts around the world. The leaks are, at best, a series of tiny windows into
a giant fortress. It’s still hard to spy on the activity within.
The documents we’ve seen – a fraction of the total number in
the hands of Guardianand Washington Post journalists – are a blur of codenames.
EVILOLIVE, MADCAPOCELOT, ORANGECRUSH, COBALTFALCON, DARKTHUNDER: the names
are beguiling.
But they don’t always tell us much, which is
their reason for existing: covernames aren’t classified, and many of them –
including the names of the NSA’s main databases for intercepted
communications data, MAINWAY, MARINA, PINWALE and NUCLEON – have been seen in
public before, in job ads and resumés posted online (these have been
collected over the years by a journalist called William Arkin, who has written
several books on American secrecy and maintains a useful blog).
It’s been a feature of the coverage that the
magic of the words has been used to stand for a generalised assertion of
continuous mass surveillance. On 29 September theNew York Times ran a story reporting that MAINWAY
was being used ‘to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social
connections’.
The next day, not wanting to have its
thunder stolen, the Guardian,
which after all owned the Snowden story, having broken it, ran a front-page piece
saying that MARINA provided the ability to look back on the past 365 days of
a user’s internet browsing behaviour. The only new piece of information in
the story – new in the sense that it hadn’t been already been reported in the Guardian – was the business of the year’s
worth of history. It was a case of my database is scarier than yours.
One reason for the uncertainty over what these things are for
and how they work is that the leaked documents aren’t everything you might
hope. The ones which have been relied on most heavily in the coverage are
PowerPoint presentations that are usually described as ‘training slides’,
even though – in the sections which have been made public, at least – they
tend not to explain how a particular system is used. They are more like
internal sales brochures aimed at the analysts, bigging up the benefits of
one method over all the others. ‘PRISM,’ one introductory slide says, ‘The
SIGAD UsedMost in NSA Reporting.’＊ A series of bar charts shows how
relatively rubbish other forms of collection are by comparison. The
presentation’s author, PRISM’s own collection manager, proudly notes the
‘exponential’ growth in the number of requests made through the system for
Skype data: 248 per cent. ‘Looks like the word is getting out about our
capability against Skype.’
The system about which most
detail is given, thanks to a presentation that begins with the question ‘What
can you do with XKEYSCORE?’, sells itself by advertising – in a
bullet-pointed list – its ‘small, focused team’ that can ‘work closely with
the analysts’. There’s some geeky speak of Linux clusters and the Federated
Query Mechanism – which simultaneously searches current traffic at all of the
NSA’s collection sites around the globe – as well as a strong sense of
startup culture: XKEYSCORE’s philosophy is ‘deploy early, deploy often’, a
weaponised version of the Silicon Valley mantra beloved of Facebook
engineers, ‘ship early, ship often’.
Some
handy use cases are listed: find everyone using PGP encryption in Iran, find
everyone in Sweden visiting an extremist web forum. ‘No other system’ – these
words highlighted in red – ‘performs this on raw unselected bulk traffic.’
There’s an endorsement from the Africa team, declaring that XKEYSCORE gave it
access to stuff from the Tunisian Interior Ministry that no other
surveillance system had managed to catch. It’s not unlike a washing powder
ad. One of the things these slides are most revealing of is the marketplace
within the NSA. At your desk in S2C41, as you sit down to find the best way
to home in on dodgy goings-on by senior Mexicans, you have a whole menu of
sexy tools to choose from.
The sales-speak nature of this material
means that it can be misleading. It was the PRISM system – which the reports
said gave the NSA ‘direct access’ to the servers of some of Silicon Valley’s
biggest and most beloved companies, including Facebook, Google, Apple and
YouTube – that dominated the headlines when the leaks first hit.
The idea that the genius behind your
perfectly engineered iPhone and the friendly souls behind the colourful
Google logo had willingly collaborated with the electronic eavesdroppers to
hand over the full set of keys to their multibillion-dollar server farms –
when there was no law that could require them to do so – was a shock to many.
It was also at some level outlandish: in most cases (if you leave aside
Apple), the data the company possesses is what generates its phenomenal
value, and it was hard to imagine that this commercially priceless property
would be freely shared with anyone, let alone with the government. (Ayn
Randist libertarian capitalists don’t like government.) The internet
companies themselves categorically denied any knowledge of the PRISM
programme, or anything like it.†
But ‘collection directly from
the servers’ was what the slides said, and the implication was that the full
unencrypted traffic from everyone’s favourite web services was being piped
wholesale into the NSA’s databases. The implication turned out to be wrong.
What happens is that an NSA analyst ‘tasks’ PRISM by nominating a ‘selector’
– meaning an email address or username – for collection and analysis. In
other words, PRISM allows an NSA worker to submit a request, which is
invariably granted, to monitor an individual Gmail account or Yahoo identity
or Facebook profile and have all its activity sent back to the NSA. (In this
context, ‘direct access’ is accurate: if a selector has been approved for
monitoring, the NSA has access to it in real time.)
One of the slides the Guardian didn’t disclose – it appeared a few
days later in theWashington Post – showed a screenshot of the tool
used to search records retrieved through PRISM.
The total count of records in the database –
in April, when the slide was made – was 117,675. It’s worth looking at that
number. Facebook has a billion users: half of the internet-connected
population of the planet has an account. The fraction of those whose full
unencrypted activity the NSA was actively monitoring can be no more than 0.01
per cent.
This isn’t to pretend that the NSA
high-mindedly refrains from seeking access to our baby pictures or inane
comments on other people’s baby pictures. But it does suggest that you don’t
fill in a form to access a random Mexican’s timeline unless you expect to get
something out of it.
Another slide the Guardian withheld – it published only five of
the 41 in the full presentation, citing security concerns, though the wish
for maximum impact could be another reason for the choice – describes the PRISM
‘tasking process’.
The slide shows a flowchart of mind-numbing
complexity. After the analyst puts selectors into the Unified Targeting Tool,
they are passed to S2 FAA Adjudicators in Each Product Line and to Special
FISA Oversight and Processing (SV4), before going to a third department,
Targeting and Mission Management (S343), pending Final Targeting Review and
Release. Somewhere at the bottom of the line the approved request gets handed
over to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), the external body
which actually interfaces with whichever internet company the NSA needs data
from. (You can see why Facebook, Google et al have found it so easy to
maintain that they aren’t systematically feeding the NSA.)
The internet company hands over the requested
data to the FBI – in 90 per cent of cases with no questions asked – and the
information is then processed and ingested into NSA databases for all
analysts to enjoy.
As ever,
the blandly obscurantist codes give little sense of what is actually going on,
and it’s easy to suppose – as many do – that all this meaningless
superstructure is designed merely to give a semblance of due process to a
system that has none. But in fact the arrangement has its devilish logic,
each coded unit standing for a whole subsection of the NSA’s huge,
hydra-headed military bureaucracy.
The full
extent of this bureaucracy is one of the most valuable lessons of the leaks.
S2 is ‘analysis and production’, S3 ‘data acquisition’. S35 and its subcodes
refer to Special Source Operations, the department responsible for conducting
the delicate task of arranging ‘partnerships’ with entities that can give the
NSA access to data that can’t be reached by any other means: cable companies,
internet backbone providers, the maintainers of the switches and relays that
keep global communications whirring.
It is
these arrangements that give rise to many of the more spectacular covernames
that have been seen recently: MONKEYROCKET, SHIFTINGSHADOW, YACHTSHOP,
SILVERZEPHYR. The type of data these sources provide, whether phone or
internet records, is lightly classified: it’s merely secret. The area the
source is targeted at – say, counterterrorism in the Middle East – is
classified top secret. How the NSA has actually gone about getting hold of
these data streams – through what pressure put on what companies by what
means – is so sensitive that none of the documents we’ve seen even hints at
it.
SILVERZEPHYR (SIGAD US-3273) is
a source of particular interest to our man on the Mexico desk. It delivers data
from Central and South America, serving up phone and fax metadata, as well as
internet records – both metadata and content. An impressive demonstration of
what can be achieved with it appears in an NSA presentation that was released
last month to Fantástico,
a Brazilian news programme, by Glenn Greenwald, the chief shepherd of the
Snowden leaks. The presentation is a case study to show the benefits of
creating ‘contact graphs’, ‘a useful way of visualising and analysing the
structure of communication networks’. The slides describe a two-week ‘surge’
operation that S2C41 carried out in the final month of the 2012 presidential
campaign against Enrique Peña Nieto, who was then leading in the polls, and
nine of his closest advisers.
The
analysts first tasked their systems with ‘seed’ selectors, representing the
phone numbers of Peña Nieto and the advisers. Using MAINWAY – the database,
you’ll remember, that allows for analysis of phone metadata and the
relationships between numbers – S2C41 then produced a ‘two-hop’ contact
graph, to show everyone each seed communicated with, and everyone those
people communicated with too. Further analysis of the graph showed who in the
network was most significant, including targets who until then hadn’t been
known.
It was then a cinch to run the content of
all text messages sent from and received by these significant numbers through
a system called DISHFIRE, which extracted any messages that were
‘interesting’. Among these messages were lists of names of the people who
would be given senior positions in a Peña Nieto administration. Six months
after Peña Nieto’s election, all the people listed had joined the government.
A case study like this shows why you really do need all the systems at your
disposal to do useful work at the NSA. It’s also a good primer in how to
learn things that are unknown to anybody other than the Mexican
president-elect, and perhaps his wife.
*
There
are rarely complaints in the US media about the practice of spying on leaders
and diplomats from foreign countries. It has always been seen as a relatively
uncontroversial part of the NSA’s mission, and indeed of the way
international affairs are conducted. The Snowden leaks have revealed some
recent operations, such as a successful effort to crack the UN’s videoconferencing
system, and an infiltration of the EU’s new building on New York’s Third
Avenue.
These have only been reported in
detail in Der Spiegel: the
Anglophone press barely cares. It’s hard not to get the impression that
international meetings are invariably bugged, and delegates’ phones
monitored, to give the home team an advantage in negotiations. The last time
there was a significant scandal in the UK about this kind of activity was in
2003, when Katharine Gun, a translator for GCHQ, leaked an email she had been
sent by an NSA official asking for her assistance in eavesdropping on member
states’ discussions to help force a favourable UN resolution on Iraq.
Clare Short, Tony Blair’s
international development secretary, claimed that she was given transcripts
of Kofi Annan’s bugged conversations at around the same time. It usually
takes something like an imminent war to bring such intelligence-gathering to
light, but it has gone on since at least the days of Herbert Yardley, the
director in the 1920s of the Cipher Bureau, a precursor to the NSA, who
helpfully explained his methods in a bestselling memoir called The American Black Chamber.
It might
be reassuring to imagine that the US surveillance complex is secretly busy
with nothing more sweeping than an old-school foreign surveillance operation,
keeping an eye on bigwigs from unfriendly countries. The legend goes that
Yardley’s operation was closed down by Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry
Stimson, who supposedly said: ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.’ What
a nice sentiment. Of course, there’s no evidence that he said any such thing,
and the moment the Cipher Bureau was shut in 1929 its files were transported
from New York to Washington by the man who had been appointed to head its
successor organisation.
‘Immediate
steps were taken,’ William Friedman later wrote, ‘completely to reorganise
the bureau and its work.’ Along with the files went the secret agreements
with the telegraph companies, such as Western Union, which would lend out
telegrams for analysis before delivering them. The telegraph companies
weren’t always comfortable with the arrangement, but it kept going in one
form or another until after the Second World War, when legal orders came into
force to compel all the major providers to share the communications they were
handling with the organisation that was about to be called the NSA.
The
programme was called SHAMROCK, and it persisted until the late 1970s, when
Senator Frank Church started investigating the NSA’s activities, declaring
them to be potentially intrusive on the lives of ordinary Americans. Church’s
high-profile investigations led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
of 1978, a law which seemed to give more freedom to citizens but was also
followed – we now know – by the introduction of a new programme to replace
the now outlawed SHAMROCK. BLARNEY – a comfortably familiar Irish name – got
going the year FISA was passed and is still a significant presence in the
Snowden files.
And then there was 9/11. The
President’s Surveillance Program (PSP) authorised broad new powers to collect
and analyse Americans’ communications without a warrant. It was, at first,
highly secret: the NSA’s own inspector general wasn’t told of its existence
until well after it had launched. Gradually the news spread and in 2004 a New York Times reporter, James Risen, started
looking into it. The response was dramatic: the Times was dissuaded from publishing its
story about it for nearly a year, and in the interim the NSA rushed to find
new legal authorities to maintain the supply of information it had come to
find so useful.
By the time the news was public, alternative
systems were already in place, and they were eventually enshrined in a 2008
amendment to FISA, FAA, the authority under which programmes such as PRISM
now operate.
Every
time one of the spies’ methods comes under the spotlight, questions of
legality arise.
The law
is changed, purportedly to stop such abuses happening again.
But
inevitably the new law includes a new route by which some version of the old
system is made valid again, and a programme that once had to be kept highly
secret can be discussed in public as much as you like.
In
response to the Snowden revelations, a new bill has been put forward, the
Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act. It sounds benign, but if
you’re of a paranoid disposition, you have reason to fear what it might
bring.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has
betrayed our trust through their use of illegal
and unconstitutional surveillance
practices. And recently, it was revealed that they have compromised
the deepest roots of Internet security. The systems of trust that
form the basis of online communication and commerce are under attack—and the
NSA must be stopped.
Flagger was created in the spirit of civil protest. By
flooding the Internet with red flag keywords, we are setting off the U.S.
National Security Agency's alarms and delivering a collectively powerful
statement through the individual free-speech messages that each user can send
out.
Flagger is not a solution to the problem of unconstitutional
government surveillance. Anyone who cares about this has a civic duty to
engage in the democratic process and attack the problem at its root. But as
long as the NSA continues to illegally spy on us, we have no reason to make
their jobs any easier.
Is this
illegal? Will the government come after me in my sleep?
I don't
believe there is anything illegal about modifying your browser to send out
extra data in URLs, but I am not a lawyer and the U.S. government arrests people for all sorts of stupid
things. Flagger is a form of civil disobedience. Use it at your
own risk.
Won't
putting extra junk in web addresses cause problems?
In most
cases, sites simply ignore the extra data that Flagger adds to your URLs. If
Flagger is causing a problem, you can easily turn it off by clicking on the
toolbar icon. There is also an option to send your red flags and message in
the background (HTTP headers) instead of altering the URLs you visit. This is
even less likely to cause problems (but less dramatic ;)
Won't putting 'lulz' and 'dear_nsa' into
every URL be easy to ignore?
Yes. It would be very easy for anyone who's spying on your
Internet traffic to filter out Flagger data if we always send those same
words into the URLs. Flagger does this by default because it's funny, but you
can randomize these by clicking"Randomize parameter names" in
the advanced options menu.
Please submit an Issue on my Github page or email me.
Be sure to include a detailed description of the problem, and include answers
to these questions 3:
What web browser are you using, and which version?
What operating system? (eg. OS X 10.8.2, Windows 8.1, Xubuntu 13.10)
What other browser add-ons do you have enabled?
I am aware that some people are experiencing problems in
Firefox, and I believe that another Firefox extension is conflicting with
Flagger. Please try disabling other extensions one-by-one (and restarting Firefox)
if you run into problems.And let
me know if you figure
it out. I might send you a cookie.
|
Saturday, October 26, 2013
IF YOU ARE CONCERNED THAT OUR GOVERNMENT’S NSA, SSS SECRECY, SURVELLIANCE STATE; HAS FAR EXCEEDED ALL BOUNDARIES AND BANS OF OUR CONSTITUTION; READ THIS!
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