If You’re Connected to the Internet, the NSA Always Has Ways of Spying On You

“The NSA has turned the Internet into a giant
surveillance platform,” declared renowned tech guru and Harvard
Berkman Center fellow Bruce Schneier at the
Cato Institute’s conference on NSA domestic spying last fall.
There are supposed to be some limits on how much snooping the NSA
and its minions can do on Americans, but a new
analysis by two Harvard researchers suggests that with clever
technical work-arounds combined with creative legal interpretations
the agency can brush aside even those paltry restrictions. In its
“Americans
as ‘vulnerable’ to NSA surveillance as foreigners, despite the
Fourth Amendment” article, ZDNet reports:

“The loopholes in current surveillance laws and today’s internet
technology may leave American communications as vulnerable to
surveillance, and as unprotected, as the internet traffic of
foreigners,” [Axel] Arnbak [co-author of the new paper] said.

Although Americans are afforded constitutional protections
against the US government from unwarranted searches of their
emails, documents, social networking data, and other cloud-stored
data while it’s stored or in-transit on US soil, the researchers
suggest these protections do not exist when American data leaves
the country.

By manipulating internet traffic to push American data outside
of the country, the NSA can vacuum up vast amounts of US citizen
data for intelligence purposes, thus “circumventing constitutional
and statutory safeguards seeking to protect the privacy of
Americans,” they warned.

ZDNet reports that an NSA spokesperson denied via email
that the agency “targets” U.S. persons by intentionally routing
their emails outside the U.S. Perhaps. But the

NSA’s lexicon is more than a bit artful, as American Civil
Liberties Union analysts Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman
pointed out in Slate last July. Words like surveillance,
collect, relevant, incidental, inadvertant, minimize and targeted
don’t mean what most of us think that they mean. Jaffer and Kaufman
point out that targeted surveillance outside the U.S. is not
limited to just foreigners:

The government’s foreign targets aren’t necessarily criminals or
terrorists—they may be journalists, lawyers, academics, or human
rights advocates. And even if one is indifferent to the NSA’s
invasion of foreigners’ privacy, the surveillance of those
foreigners involves the acquisition of Americans’ communications
with those foreigners. The spying may be “targeted” at
foreigners, but it vacuums up thousands of Americans’ phone calls
and emails.

In fact, the Harvard researchers observe:

A network owned by a single organization (even an organization
that is nominally “based” in the U.S. such as Yahoo! or Google) can
be physically located in multiple jurisdictions. The revealed
MUSCULAR/TURMOIL program illustrates how the N.S.A. exploited this
by presuming authority under E[xecutive] O[rder] 12333 to acquire
traffic between Google and Yahoo! servers located on foreign
territory, collecting up to 180 million user records per month,
regardless of nationality.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported last fall just

how broadly Executive Order 12333 is being interpreted by the
NSA when it comes to spying on Americans whose internet traffic is
incidentally routed outside the country.

Given the past record of the NSA’s leadership with regard to
truthtelling,
it’s reasonable to assume that the agency is engaging in technical
hanky-panky as a way to get around the pesky Fourth Amendment
rights of Americans. Because there is no way to correct its abuses
and corruptions, it remains the case that “Secret Government is
the Chief Threat to Liberty.”