NSA Tracks People Using Google Cookies
The Washington Post has a detailed article on how the NSA uses cookie data to track individuals. The EFF also has a good post on this.
I have been writing and saying that surveillance is the business model of the Internet, and that government surveillance largely piggy backs on corporate capabilities. This is an example of that. The NSA doesn’t need the cooperation of any Internet company to use their cookies for surveillance purposes, but they do need their capabilities. And because the Internet is largely unencrypted, they can use those capabilities for their own purposes.
Reforming the NSA is not just about government surveillance. It has to address the public-private surveillance partnership. Even as a group of large Internet companies have come together to demand government surveillance reform, they are ignoring their own surveillance activities. But you can’t reform one without the other. The Free Software Foundation has written about this as well.
Little has been written about how QUANTUM interacts with cookie surveillance. QUANTUM is the NSA’s program for real-time responses to passive Internet monitoring. It’s what allows them to do packet injection attacks. The NSA’s Tor Stinks presentation talks about a subprogram called QUANTUMCOOKIE: “forces clients to divulge stored cookies.” My guess is that the NSA uses frame injection to surreptitiously force anonymous users to visit common sites like Google and Facebook and reveal their identifying cookies. Combined with the rest of their cookie surveillance activities, this can de-anonymize Tor users if they use Tor from the same browser they use for other Internet activities.
Sven • December 12, 2013 8:23 AM
My apologies I don’t have an English version ready…
op een universiteit ergens op deze aardkloot
leeft protest
maar het merendeel van de mensheid
vind het best
dat op het internet de privacy
een natuurlijke dood
gestorven is
niemand die er wat om geeft
de ICT-ers hebben het voor altijd bedorven
big data, data retention en het kapitalisme
doen de rest
het is een en al droevenis
bedrijven die doen aan informatieverzameling
zeggen pakken wat je pakken kan
een nuchtere boer uit de polder zegt
daar komt alleen maar heibel van
en een enkeling waartoe het doordringt
beseft het is onbegonnen werk
aan deze wereldwijde massaverzameling en analyse
stelt men nooit paal en perk