Two things to contemplate on
early Sunday morning, before church or political talk shows get
underway:
Remember all those times we were told that the government,
especially the National Security Agency (NSA), only tracks folks
who either guilty of something or involved in suspicious-seeming
activity? Well, we’re going to have amend that a bit. Using
documents from Edward Snowden,
the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman,
Julie Tate, and Ashkan Soltani report
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far
outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications
intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S.
digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The
Washington Post.Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted
conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended
surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast
for somebody else.Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance
files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail
addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S.
citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more
than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The
Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the
files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or
U.S.residents.
The cache of documents in question date from 2009 through 2012
and comprise 160,000 documents collected up the PRISM and Upstream,
which collect data from different sources. “Most of the people
caught up in those programs are not the targets and would not
lawfully qualify as such,” write Gellman, Julie Tate, and Ashkan
Soltani, who also underscore that NSA surveillance has produced
some very meaningful and good intelligence. The real question is
whether the government can do that in a way that doesn’t result in
massive dragnet programs that create far more problems ultimately
than they solve (remember the Church Committee?).
Read
the whole thing. And before anyone raises the old “if
you’re innocent, you’ve got nothing to hide shtick,” read Scott
Shackford’s “3
Reasons the ‘Noting to Hide’ Crowd Should be worried about
Government Surveillance.”
And in case you think you’ve somehow slipped the surveillance
drag, check this out.
Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow walks through the
rules used by the NSA to figure out who is worthy of being watched.
Among the trip wires are interests in Tor, an encrypted browser
(partly funded by the U.S. government to help online activists in
repressive regimes) and Tails, a secure operating system favored by
the likes of Edward Snowden.
We’ve written
a fair amount about the Tor Project, including a great
interview with Karen Reilly, the project’s development director.
“People are under the impression that the Internet is sort of
anonymous by default,” Reilly told us last year. “They don’t know
how many digital trails they’re leaving behind.”
More on the new Tor and Tails revelations at Reason 24/7,
courtesy of Zenon Evans.
Here’s our interview with Reilly. Don’t watch unless you want to
open yourself up to NSA snooping. Oh, wait, it’s already too
late.
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