EFF Reports GHCQ and NSA Keeping Tabs On Wikileaks Visitors and Reporters 82
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."
Power Corrupts (Score:5, Insightful)
And Absolute Power Corrupts, mainly those who use "Secret Courts" and "National Security" as tools to get the power they want.
Yes, our government is rotten. The Congress critters, the Senators, the White House. They have failed us on mainly levels. They all need to be impeached and we need to get new peeps in there who remember that the United States is made of of it's citizens, not the corporations.
Close, but (Score:2)
...all know their secrets have been Hoovered up by the NSA during a decade of mining. Why else do you think there has been such a muted response to Mr. Snowden's discoveries? J Edgar was never really challenged either; most timidly waited until he died.
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Re:Power Corrupts (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, our government is a reflection of its citizens, the government ha not forgotten that the US is made of citizens, it is a distilled representation of them. Unfortunately for us the voter base of the US is a highly conflicted and fragmented society with passionately mutually exclusive ideas about how to do things. In many ways the best way to fix things would be a one time massive tax, split the country up into maybe half a dozen or dozen countries, and pay moving expenses to anyone who wants to migrate to the region that best represents them. Much of the rottenness comes from our deeply conflicted philosophies, which I am not sure there is any way to reconcile.
Of course it also does not help that so much of the population are arm-chair economists (or other such things) who believe that their basic idealistic understanding of problems (where they do not have to deal with the complexities or consequences) is more valid then people who spend decades examining them, so people passionately vote about things they do not actually understand all that well but really strongly believe that they do.
Which is probably why so many fictional worlds go with guild-style governments where representation is built around professions rather then geographic regions.
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Free Cascadia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
"ON" (Score:1)
... Keeping Tabs ON Wikileaks Visitors...
Reminds me of Deus Ex (Score:1)
The more I read the news the more I feel like I fell asleep after playing too much Deus Ex back in year 2000 and simply never woke up again. I wonder which levels of paranoia writers will have to appeal to in the coming decades to out do reality.
Third-degree websurfing (Score:3, Insightful)
"THEIR CRIME IS CURIOSITY [imdb.com]"
Not only Wikileaks Visitors are counted (Score:5, Interesting)
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On a point of pedantry, you can't have 123.456.78.90 because 456 is greater than 255.
tanquam ex ungue leonem (Score:2)
The government is doing things for which there are even patents? Wow. I had no idea.
Geez, with IPv6 giving every single web client a distinct address, you'd think the NSA would be campaigning behind the scenes to have their carefully curated fat-pipe monopolists ramming IPv6 down our collective throats.
And damn, what a surprising patent, with only about a thousand years of prior art.
Everybody, visit wikileaks now! (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's all go and visit wikileaks now, just to produce more noise in their statistics. Even better, visit wikileaks from different machines (home, work). Set up a cron job to "test network connection" by fetching a page from wikileaks every hour, on some old idle server at some random customer site...
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Re:Everybody, visit wikileaks now! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's safe to presume that you, as well as every other internet user, were already under surveillance to some degree even before this story was published.
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https://wikileaks.org/helloNSA_GCHQ/we_all_know_you_are_watching_and_dont_care.html
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ROFLMAO
404
We are sorry, the file you have requested could not be found.
Please wait few minutes and try again.
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Don't worry - the NSA will do it to you the French way, the Greek way, the English way, and a few ways that you've never heard of as well!
Organisational mandates (Score:5, Informative)
This part of the summary made me pause:
Nowhere can I find any indication that the mandates of the NSA, GCHQ, MI5, MI5, the CIA, the FBI (or any other of the organisations usually linked in these stories) are limited to anti-terrorism duties alone - it may form a large part of their activities, but its not their sole purpose.
Putting everything else aside, that part of the article is ridiculous.
Re:Organisational mandates (Score:4, Informative)
it may form a large part of their activities,
No, it forms a large part of the political excuse to create and fund these entities.
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No, it forms a large part of the political excuse to create and fund these entities.
Those agencies all existed decades before 9/11, which I expect you knew. Do you want to guess again?
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That's an interesting insight you have there. Boogeymen are generally considered to be imaginary creatures that pose no genuine threat. Does that mean that you think that the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union (and other communist nations) posed no genuine threat to either the US or UK?
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Eastasia is (apparently) a literary reference to 1984, and doesn't really apply. Pedophiles aren't a focus of national security, but the FBI does investigate them as part of ordinary law enforcement. Terrorists do exist and have repeatedly attacked the US, its embassies, and armed forces, causes thousands of deaths. Terrorism does present an ongoing threat. The Soviets are basically gone, but Russia is picking up where they left off by assuming many former Soviet practices, including threatening NATO wi
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Sympathy for the Nazis? Pity for them? Interesting .....
And the US or UK doesn't need a standing army? Dude ....
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Which does nothing whatsoever to change his point, since ones ones HAVE been created - hello Fatherland Security - and it has been used to fund them. Like he said.
Do you want to try not being willfully obtuse?
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The Department of Homeland Security is almost entirely nothing but a regrouping of already existing agencies (FEMA, Coast Guard, Customs, border security, etc. ) under a new headquarters. You can panic about that if you want, but I don't think there is much reason for it. In fact DHS is mostly what the Ministry of Interior is in other countries. (That name was already taken in the US for a different purpose.)
Do you want to try not being willfully obtuse?
I think the most delicious irony is often the unintentional irony.
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Which again does what to change the fact that it's a new agency with a new bureaucracy. Nothing.
As if there wasn't already a great deal of redundancy amongst the various intelligence agencies [intelligence.gov] well before 911.
Probably because you're a highly dishonest person with extremely low intelligence. New agency? Check. Used as an excuse for fu
Re:Organisational mandates (Score:5, Informative)
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It's included in a question, as an example.
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Nowhere can I find any indication that the mandates of the NSA, GCHQ, MI5, MI5, the CIA, the FBI (or any other of the organisations usually linked in these stories) are limited to anti-terrorism duties alone - it may form a large part of their activities, but its not their sole purpose.
Indeed. I'm not sure of the complete history of most of those agencies but weren't a large number of them funded under the principle of domestic counter-intelligence? The NSA has it's history in breaking ciphers of WWI, the CIA espionage of Axis forces during WWII, MI5 heck that was formed on the basis of counterintelligence.
All of these agencies and others around the world (ASIO was formed to eliminate Soviet spies from the Australian government), were formed on the basis of defending countries from foreig
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Admins, please add a "Naïve" category to the moderation options.
Re:Organisational mandates (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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"It's illegal for the United States to spy on it's citizens. Likewise the same for Great Britain. But under the terms of the UK-USA agreement, Britain spies on Americans and America spies on British citizens and the two groups trade data."
http://nstarzone.com/SPIES.htm... [nstarzone.com]
You may or may not accept that link as any kind of a source - but you may take any bit of that page, and go in search of more authoritative sources, if you wish.
Long story short, our governments have a long history of circumventing the law
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Their defininition of 'journalist' ...
The distinction between "journalist" and "foreign propagandist" often depends on the government that's making the distinction.
Just ask Tokyo Rose [wikipedia.org].
back at ya (Score:1)
Yes, NSA, we're watching you too.
You don't get it yet, do you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anybody could be a terrorist if global pressures, governmental stupidity, and corporate greed cause them to snap.
Anybody.
So they're not "exceeding their mandate." You just don't realize that even John Q. Milquetoast is a potential terrorist.
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Nobody is a terrorist. Terrorism is a tactic. It's like calling the Nazis "Blitzkriegers" or the WW II Americans "Island hoppers" (or "Nukers" if you will). States/Organizations/People use terror as a tool to reach their objective. Terror is not the objective. Using such a blanket term is, in my opinion, just a sign of intellectual laziness and will bring us no closer to solutions. It leads to a lack of understanding of the base motivation for conflict.
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By a certain definition, the War On Terror was - itself - terrorism. It's purpose was basically stated as making "terrorism" so scary to contemplate based on a threat of violence and economic destruction, that people wouldn't do it.
It "worked" (for a certain definition of that word) only because the majority of places decided not to stand against the biggest guy in the room. That works only until those places change their mind, get together, or that guy isn't so big any more. Did it stop the overall exi
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It's a business model. Spend war money to train terrorists, then ask for and spend more war money to eradicate terrorists in a way that breeds more terrorists. Vicious cycle, more money gets perpetually sent towards the businesses that profit from war.
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Depends on what you mean by targeted.
Was their data concerning a website they visited collected without their knowledge? If the article is right, almost certainly.
Was it analysed? Probably.
Were people then sneaking into the back garden going through their trash looking for Julian Assange? Probably not.
Nobody is saying that millions of people were observed to any great detail. What we're saying is that GCHQ et al were looking at data sent by visitors to a particular website covertly. All visitors. Fore
Hi GCHQ (Score:2)
I'm almost certainly on one of their lists somewhere then. Makes me feel kinda important.
- Mathematician and computer scientist.
- Special personal interest in cryptography, peer-to-peer networking, etc.
- Wikileaks visitor back in the early days. Not since the Julian Assange junk, though, it has to be said. Can't stand the guy.
- I keep looking at MI5 / GCHQ jobs in the papers and on their website, and their online competitions, but far too peace-loving to actually apply to be one of them. That's gotta fl
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So is Guantanamo Bay. Quite clearly and obviously.
The question (which has no answer for the likes of you and me) is: What the hell do you expect others to do about it?
Read the next paragraph about Guantanamo, or about spying privacy violations. Tell me where it would differ:
"For sure, I hoped my country would at least condemn such actions. They didn't. Wars have been started over less. Nothing happened. We've sanctioned countries because of less. No such thing occurred. 'We' got it onto the news, i
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Jimmy Carter’s forgotten history lesson
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/1... [salon.com]
"....President Carter attempted to clean up the CIA, firing almost 20 percent of its employees...."
The good news in 2014 is more people using the web, in the wider press now understand more about aspects of crypto and the reality of the "keys" over time too:
"Judges Poised to Hand U.S. Spies the Keys to the Internet" (02.03.14)
http://www.wire [wired.com]
Why don't they just classify them as terrorists... (Score:1)
GHCQ? (Score:2)
They do this for a number of sites (Score:2)
They don't like wikileaks, or its peers. They also track things like visits to cryptome. They look for risk by people who go to sites that teach the substance of the anarchists cookbook. There are "finger-prints" or eigenvectors of site visitation that they associate with higher and lower risk. If you visit sites a,b, and c, then you are just a harmless teenager making a prank. If you visit sites a, b, not-c, and d, then you might be a threat.
You aren't suprised that the evil empire doesn't like that S
Journalist and NSA both have N in them! (Score:1)
The NSA...asked other governments without First Amendment protections to prosecute journalists?
Ummm, I want someone to go to jail, but it sure as hell ain't journalists.
Hmmm ... (Score:2)