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In 2008, Yahoo fought the NSA to avoid becoming part of the PRISM program. It eventually lost the court battle, and at one point was threatened with a $250,000 a day fine if it continued to resist. I am continually amazed at the extent of the government coercion.
New Zealand is spying on its citizens. Edward Snowden weighs in personally.
The NSA and GCHQ are mapping the entire Internet, including hacking into Deutsche Telekom and other companies.
EDITED TO ADD (9/18): Marcy Wheeler comments on the second story, noting that the NSA uses this capability to map MAC addresses.
WikiLeaks has organized the trove of documents about corporations aiding government surveillance around the world. It’s worth wandering around through all this material.
EDITED TO ADD (9/12): I made a mistake. WikiLeaksdidn’t do the organizing; Silk did.
Researchers are able to recover sound through soundproof glass by recording the vibrations of a plastic bag.
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.
In other experiments, they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant.
This isn’t a new idea. I remember military security policies requiring people to close the window blinds to prevent someone from shining a laser on the window and recovering the sound from the vibrations. But both the camera and processing technologies are getting better.
News story.
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”:
The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.
The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.
Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter “it seems clear at this point” that there was another.
Everyone’s miscounting. This is the third leaker:
Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler has written an excellent law-review article on the need for a whistleblower defense. And there’s this excellent article by David Pozen on why government leaks are, in general, a good thing.
New America Foundation has a new paper on the costs of NSA surveillance: economic costs to US business, costs to US foreign policy, and costs to security.
News article.
Last week, we learned that the NSA targets people who look for information about Tor. A few days later, the operator of a Tor exit node in Austria has been found guilty as an accomplice, because someone used his computer to transmit child porn. Even more recently, Tor has been named as a defendant in a revenge-porn suit in Texas because it provides web-porn operators with privacy.
Here’s the EFF: “Seven Things You Should Know About Tor.”
EDITED TO ADD (7/16): It seems that article about Tor in Austria was wrong.
The latest Snowden story is a catalog of exploit tools from JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group), a unit of the British GCHQ, for both surveillance and propaganda. It’s a list of code names and short descriptions, such as these:
GLASSBACK: Technique of getting a targets IP address by pretending to be a spammer and ringing them. Target does not need to answer.
MINIATURE HERO: Active skype capability. Provision of real time call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists.
MOUTH: Tool for collection for downloading a user’s files from Archive.org.
PHOTON TORPEDO: A technique to actively grab the IP address of MSN messenger user.
SILVER SPECTOR: Allows batch Nmap scanning over Tor.
SPRING BISHOP: Find private photographs of targets on Facebook.
ANGRY PIRATE: is a tool that will permanently disable a target’s account on their computer.
BUMPERCAR+: is an automated system developed by JTRIG CITD to support JTRIG BUMPERCAR operations. BUMPERCAR operations are used to disrupt and deny Internet-based terror videos or other materials. The techniques employs the services provided by upload providers to report offensive materials.
BOMB BAY: is the capacity to increase website hits/rankings.
BURLESQUE: is the capacity to send spoofed SMS messages.
CLEAN SWEEP: Masquerade Facebook Wall Posts for individuals or entire countries.
CONCRETE DONKEY: is the capacity to scatter an audio message to a large number of telephones, or repeatedely bomb a target number with the same message.
GATEWAY: Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website.
GESTATOR: amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube).
SCRAPHEAP CHALLENGE: Perfect spoofing of emails from Blackberry targets.
SUNBLOCK: Ability to deny functionality to send/receive email or view material online.
SWAMP DONKEY: is a tool that will silently locate all predefined types of file and encrypt them on a targets machine
UNDERPASS: Change outcome of online polls (previously known as NUBILO).
WARPATH: Mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign.
HAVLOCK: Real-time website cloning techniques allowing on-the-fly alterations.
HUSK: Secure one-on-one web based dead-drop messaging platform.
There’s lots more. Go read the rest. This is a big deal, as big as the TAO catalog from December.
I would like to post the entire list. If someone has a clever way of extracting the text, or wants to retype it all, please send it to me.
EDITED TO ADD (7/16): HTML of the entire catalog is here.
The latest story from the Snowden documents is about five prominent Muslim Americans who were spied on by the NSA and FBI. It’s a good story, and I recommend reading it in its entirety. I have a few observations.
One, it’s hard to assess the significance of this story without context. The source document is a single spreadsheet that lists 7,485 e-mail addresses monitored between 2002 and 2008.
The vast majority of individuals on the “FISA recap” spreadsheet are not named. Instead, only their email addresses are listed, making it impossible in most cases to ascertain their identities. Under the heading “Nationality,” the list designates 202 email addresses as belonging to “U.S. persons,” 1,782 as belonging to “non-U.S. persons,” and 5,501 as “unknown” or simply blank. The Intercept identified the five Americans placed under surveillance from their email addresses.
Without knowing more about this list, we don’t know whether this is good or bad. Is 202 a lot? A little? Were there FISA warrants that put these people on the list? Can we see them?
Two, the 2008 date is important. In July of that year, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act, which restricted what sorts of surveillance the NSA can do on Americans. So while this story tells us about what was happening before the FAA, we don’t know what—if anything—changed with the passage of the FAA.
Three, another significant event at the time was the FBI’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation on terrorism charges. This brought with it an overly broad investigation of Muslim Americans who were just associated with that charity, but that investigation came with approved warrants and all the due process it was supposed to have. How many of the Americans on this list are there as a result of this one case?
Four, this list was just the starting point for a much broader NSA surveillance effort. As Marcy Wheeler pointed out, these people were almost certainly associationally mapped. CAIR founder Nihad Awad is one of the NSA targets named in the story. CAIR is named in an EFF lawsuit against the NSA. If Awad had any contact with the EFF in 2008, then they were also being spied on—that’s one hop. Since I had lots of contact with the EFF in the affected time period, I was being spied on as well—that’s two hops. And if any of you e-mailed me around that time—well, that’s three hops. This isn’t “just metadata”; this is full-take content that’s stored forever. And, yes, the president instructed the NSA to only spy people up to two hops away this January, but that was just one program under one authority.
This is a hard story to analyze, because it’s more anecdote than data. I much preferred last Saturday’s story that tried to analyze broad trends about who the subjects of NSA surveillance are. But anecdotes are more persuasive than data, so this story might be more compelling to a mainstream audience.
Other commentary: EFF, Ben Wittes, the Director of National Intelligence. I’m curious to watch how this story unfolds in the media.
One final note: I just couldn’t think of a headline more sensationalist than the descriptive one.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.