If You Want the NSA to Monitor You, Do This.

Want to attract the attention of NSA cubical
dwellers? Then just use the TOR anonymizing system or try
researching operating systems other Windows. As Patrick Tucker over
at
Defense One explains:

If you take certain steps to mask your identity online, such as
using the encryption service TOR, or even investigating an
alternative to the buggy Windows operating system, you’re all but
asking for “deep” monitoring by the NSA…

According to a recent report from the German media outlet
Tagesschau,
a group of TOR affiliates working with Tagesschau looked into the
source
code for [the NSA’s] XKeyscore. They found that nine servers
running TOR, including one at the MIT Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, were under constant NSA
surveillance. The code also revealed some of the behaviors that
users could undertake to immediately be tagged or “fingerprinted”
for so-called deep packet inspection, an investigation into the
content of data packages you send across the Internet, such as
emails, web searches and browsing history.

If you are located outside of the U.S., Canada, the U.K. or one
of the so-called
Five Eyes countries partnering with the NSA in its surveillance
efforts, then visiting the TOR website triggers an automatic
fingerprinting. In other words, simply investigating
privacy-enhancing methods from outside of the United States is an
act worthy of scrutiny and surveillance according to rules that
make
XKeyscore run. Another infraction: hating Windows…

If you visit the forum page for the popular Linux Journal,
dedicated to the open-source operating system Linux, you could be
fingerprinted regardless of where you live because the XKeystore
source code designates the Linux Journal as an “extremist forum.”
Searching for the Tails,
operating system, another Windows alternative popular among human
rights watchers, will also land you on the deep-packet
inspectee list.

The whole Defense One
article is worth your attention.

I do wonder if my regular use of DuckDuckGo for
searches worries the folks over at the NSA? For more background,
see my article, “How
to Keep Your Government From Spying On You.” See also my
collegue Scott Shackford’s excellent post from yesterday on just
how “inadvertant”
the NSA’s spying on American citizens really is.