[Vision2020] The NSA is Targeting Users of Privacy Services, Leaked Code Shows

[Paul Rumelhart]

I am pasting in the entire article for your convenience.  I will also
provide a link to the article itself.  Be warned, though, that if you click
on the link to the publicly-published Wired magazine website to view this
article and you are not located in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand
or the UK your IP address could be collected and stored by the NSA.  I
encourage those of you who are brave enough to defy your government by
clicking on a link to specific article in a legitimate mass-market online
magazine to go ahead and do so.  All it will do is get you added to another
list (I'm guessing we're all on one, somewhere), thus reducing their
signal-to-noise ratio for people legitimately concerned about privacy (such
as dissidents, whistleblowers, oppressed people, people behind censorship
firewalls, etc.

As a side note, I'm pleased as punch that anyone who goes to the online
magazine "Linux Journal", even if you are in one of the "Five Eyes"
countries, gets their IP address recorded.  Why?  Because it means that
they fear those of us who use an OS that can't be as easily back-doored,
which is a good thing.

First, the link of extreme extremism:
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/nsa-targets-users-of-privacy-services/  What
an F-ed up country we live in.

Second, the article itself.  Have a nice day.

The NSA Is Targeting Users of Privacy Services, Leaked Code Shows

   - By Kim Zetter <http://www.wired.com/author/kimzetter/>
   - 07.03.14  |
   - 5:45 pm  |


If you use Tor or any of a number of other privacy services online or even
visit their web sites to read about the services, there’s a good chance
your IP address has been collected and stored by the NSA, according to
top-secret source code for a program the NSA uses to conduct internet
surveillance.

There’s also a good chance you’ve been tagged for simply reading news
articles about these services published by Wired and other sites.

This is according to code, obtained and analyzed by journalists and others
in Germany, which for the first time reveals the extent of some of the
wide-spread tracking the NSA conducts on people using or interested in
using privatizing tools and services—a list that includes journalists and
their sources, human rights activists, political dissidents living under
oppressive countries and many others who have various reasons for needing
to shield their identity and their online activity.

The source code, for the NSA system known as XKeyscore, is used in the
collection and analysis of internet traffic, and reveals that simply
searching the web for privacy tools online is enough to get the NSA to
label you an “extremist” and target your IP address for inclusion in its
database.

But the NSA’s analysis isn’t limited to tracking metadata like IP
addresses. The system also conducts deep-packet inspection of emails that
users exchange with the Tor anonymizing service to obtain information that
Tor conveys to users of so-called Tor “bridges.”

Legal experts say the widespread targeting of people engaged in
constitutionally protected activity like visiting web sites and reading
articles, raises questions about the legal authority the NSA is using to
track users in this way.

“Under [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] there are numerous
places where it says you shouldn’t be targeting people on the basis of
activities protected by the First Amendment,” says Kurt Opsahl, deputy
general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I can’t see how
this activity could have been properly authorized under FISA. This is
suggesting then that they have come up with some other theory of
authorizing this.”

The findings also contradict NSA longstanding claims that its surveillance
targets only those suspected of engaging in activity that threatens
national security.

“They say ‘We’re not doing indiscriminate searches,’ but this is
indiscriminate,” Opsahl notes. “It’s saying that anyone who is looking for
those various [services] are suspicious persons.”

He notes that the NSA actions are at clear odds with statements from former
U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and others in the government about
the importance of privacy services and tools to protect First Amendment
freedoms.

“One hand of the government is promoting tools for human rights advocates
and political dissidents to be able to communicate and is championing that
activity,” he says. “While another branch of the government is determining
that that activity is suspicious and requires tracking. This may intimidate
people from using these very important tools and have a chilling effect
that could undermine the free expression of ideas throughout the world.”

The findings were uncovered and published by Norddeutscher Rundfunk and
Westdeutscher Rundfunk—two public radio and TV broadcasting organizations
in Germany. An English-language analysis of the findings
<http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/xkeyscorerules100.txt>, along with parts
of the source code for the XKeyscore program—was also published by Jacob
Appelbaum, a well-known American developer employed by the Tor Project, and
two others in Germany who play significant roles in Tor.

*Secrets Revealed in the Code*

XKeyscore is the collection system the NSA uses to scoop up internet data
and analyze it. It has been described in NSA documents leaked by Edward
Snowden as a crucial tool that the NSA can use to monitor “nearly
everything a user does on the internet.”

Embedded in the code they found rules describing what XKeyscore is focused
on monitoring. The rules indicate that the NSA tracks any IP address that
connects to the Tor web site or any IP address that contacts a server that
is used for an anonymous email service called MixMinion that is maintained
by a server at MIT. XKeyscore targets any traffic to or from an IP address
for the server. The NSA is also tracking anyone who visits the popular
online Linux publication, Linux Journal, which the NSA refers to as an
“extremist forum” in the source code.

Tor was originally developed and funded by the U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory in the late ’90s to help government employees shield their
identity online, but it was later passed to the public sector for use. Tor
has since been completely rebuilt by developers, and is now overseen by the
Tor Project, a non-profit in Massachusetts, though it is still primarily
funded by government agencies.

Tor allows users to surf the internet as well as conduct chat and send
instant messages anonymously. It works by encrypting the traffic and
relaying it through a number of random servers, or nodes, hosted by
volunteers around the world to make it difficult for anyone to trace the
data back to its source. Each node in the network can only see the previous
node that sent it the traffic and the next node to which it’s sending the
traffic.

In documents released by Edward Snowden, NSA workers discussed their
frustration in spying on people who use Tor. “We will never be able to
de-anonymize all Tor users all the time,” one internal NSA document noted.

But the XKeyscore source code reveals some of the ways the NSA attempts to
overcome this obstacle.

Tor isn’t the only target of XKeyscore, however. The system is also
targeting users of other privacy services: Tails, HotSpotShield, FreeNet,
Centurian, FreeProxies.org, and MegaProxy.

Tails is an operating system <http://www.wired.com/2014/04/tails/> used by
human rights activists, as well as many of the journalists who have access
to the Edward Snowden documents, to protect sensitive computer activity. It
runs from a USB stick or CD so that it’s not stored on the system, and uses
Tor and other privacy tools to protect user activity. At the end of each
session, when the user reboots it, Tails erases any data pertaining to that
session—such as evidence of documents opened or chats—except for data the
user has specifically saved to an encrypted storage device. The NSA clearly
regards Tails as a sinister tool, however, referring to it in one comment
in the source code as “a comsec mechanism advocated by extremists on
extremist forums.”

The XKeyscore rule for monitoring Tails users indicates that it is designed
to identify users searching for the software program, as well as anyone
“viewing documents relating to TAILs, or viewing websites that detail
TAILs.”

*How XKeyscore Works*

The XKeyscore rules use features the NSA calls “appids,” “fingerprints,”
and “microplugins,” to identify and tag activity online.

Appids, the German publication notes, are unique identifiers that help the
system sort and categorize data and user activity, such as an online
search. The microplugins are possibly used to extract and store specific
types of data.

The rules indicate that the NSA is specifically targeting the IP address of
nine servers operated by key Tor volunteers in Germany, Sweden, Austria,
the Netherlands and even the U.S. These servers are used by the Tor network
as directory authorities. They generate, on an hourly basis, a directory of
all the Tor nodes or relays on the Tor network, which change constantly as
new servers are added by volunteers or taken out of the network. The Tor
software consults these lists to direct traffic to the nodes. The XKeyscore
system uses a fingerprint called “anonymizer/tor/node/authority” that
targets any IP address that connects to the nine servers.

One of the servers is maintained by Sebastian Hahn, a 28-year-old a Tor
volunteer and computer science student at the University of Erlangen. A
German attorney told the media outlets that the targeting of Tor volunteers
in Germany may violate restrictions against the US conducting secret
intelligence activity against German citizens in Germany.

Another server is operated at MIT by Tor Project leader Roger Dingledine,
an MIT alumnus. But in addition to serving as one of the Tor directory
authorities, the server is also used to operate the MixMinion mail service
and host a number of other web sites, including ones for online gaming
libraries, which means the NSA may be collecting IP addresses for those
users as well.

The XKeyscore rules indicate that in addition to tracking activity to these
Tor directory servers, the NSA also records and stores any IP address that
connects to the thousands of Tor relays on the network. These addresses are
all publicly known, as they are listed in the directory distributed by the
nine servers. But in addition to these, there are non-public “bridges” that
volunteers in the Tor network maintain. These can be used by human rights
activists and others in repressive regimes like Iran and China that censor
internet traffic and block their citizens from using known Tor relays.

To obtain the non-public address of one of these bridges users send an
email to the Tor Project or request an address via the Tor web site. To
unmask these private bridges, however, XKeyscore records any connections to
the bridges.torproject.org server and uses a microplugin to then read the
contents of the email that the Tor Project sends to requesters in order to
obtain the address of the bridge.

The NSA also tracks the IP address of anyone who simply visits the Tor web
site, though it specifically avoids fingerprinting users believed to be
located in Five Eyes countries—the spying partnership that includes
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US—from others. This appears
to be the only distinction made for Five Eyes users, however. The rules for
fingerprinting visitors to the Tails web site or the web site for the Linux
Journal do not include such exceptions in the version of source code the
media outlets examined.

The EFF’s Opsahl says the exception made for these users with IP addresses
in these countries is odd since the constitution protects U.S. citizens
from NSA surveillance no matter which country they’re in, and people using
or interested in using privacy services are likely to shield their real IP
address when they visit these sites, making it difficult for the NSA to
know exactly where they’re really located.

XKeyscore additionally tracks the addresses for web sites that use Tor
Hidden Services to hide their location on the internet. Sites that use Tor
Hidden Services—part of the so-called Dark Web—have a special Tor URL that
can only be accessed by those using the Tor browser and who know the
specific address. Tor Hidden Services is used by activists to host forums
discussing their activity, though it is also used by sites selling illegal
drugs and other illicit goods. XKeyscore catalogs every one of these URLs
it can discover by culling through what it calls “raw traffic” and storing
the address in a database.
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