EFF Reports GHCQ and NSA Keeping Tabs On Wikileaks Visitors and Reporters

sandbagger writes in with a story about U.S. and British government interest and involvement with journalists visiting the Wikileaks website. "The Intercept recently published an article and supporting documents indicating that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ surveilled and even sought to have other countries prosecute the investigative journalism website WikiLeaks. GCHQ also surveilled the millions of people who merely read the WikiLeaks website. The article clarifies the lengths that these two spy organizations go to track their targets and confirms, once again, that they do not confine themselves to spying on to those accused of terrorism. One document contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices discuss whether to categorize WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor" for surveillance targeting purposes. This would be an important categorization because agents have significantly more authority to engage in surveillance of malicious foreign actors."

Not only Wikileaks Visitors are counted

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read carefully all information on this topic the you will conclude that all visits to all websites are recorded by IP address, and this information is kept for ever. There are multiple and overlapping spying programs for that. In fact, every IP address has a profile, such as IP address 123.456.78.90 in requested period (such as a year) has visited following websites google (904 times), cnn (850), amazon (49), espn (545), facebook( 490), vevo (450), youtube (689), slashdot (365) etc. This profile of every IP address has it's own fingerprint, which is basically modified statistical distribution of the websites visited. There are even patents filed which allow identification of individual only by this fingerprint. Obviously, if you are visiting websites such as wikileaks, democracynow or any other that are designated as "malicious", your IP address is automatically flagged. What the slides show is duplication of efforts as a preventative measure to have a second, independent and precise record of visitors so that when the future whistle blowers will provide information, it will be easier to trace down to the origin. The real action, however, is not a collection itself, but what later happens with the data collected. You would be fool not to assume that analysts are not further analyzing the data and making conclusions. If, for example, someone from us military IP (or IP associated with miliatry) would start sending gigabytes of data, that someone would most certainly be getting extra attention.

Re:Everybody, visit wikileaks now!

[ketomax]

What about reading this slashdot discussion? Does that put me under surveillance too? Surely, more productive things can be run on these computing resources than looking into my boredom remedies.

Re:Everybody, visit wikileaks now!

[Anonymous Coward]

https://wikileaks.org/helloNSA_GCHQ/we_all_know_you_are_watching_and_dont_care.html

Re:Organisational mandates

[inhuman_4]

A big part of the issue is that some of these organizations shouldn't be doing any of this at all.

A big part missing the the discussion is that the NSA is a military outfit. It is part of the DoD and its commander is a serving member of the US armed forces. It is the signals intelligence branch of the US military. Their primay mission is ensure secure communications for the US command and control infastructure, and gather intelligence on foreign military powers.

How did we get from spying on the Soviet Union, to monitoring the phones of every American citizen? As a military outfit they shouldn't be operating in the the US at all. You wouldn't let soldiers patrol the streets acting like cops, so why are thay taking on tasks the rightfully belong on the hands of the FBI? The simple answer is secrecy. Whatever legal games they want to play, at the end of the day they knew that they shouldn't be doing it, so the tasked it to the DoD so they can call it a matter of national security.