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

[Scott Dredge]

<What an F-ed up country we live in.>

We don't live in an effed up country.  If anything technology *might* have simply evolved past the Constitutional protections put in place to limit government powers.  My bet would be that the 4th Amendment would still hold up against improper NSA snooping.  Short of a Supreme Court ruling or Congressional action, don't expect the NSA to just turn a blind eye out of the goodness of their heart.  Spying is part of their job responsibilities.

Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2014 13:59:06 -0700
From: paul.rumelhart at gmail.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] The NSA is Targeting Users of Privacy Services,	Leaked Code Shows

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  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,
 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
 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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