NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57606178-83/nsa-tracks-google-ads-to-find-tor-users/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title

by fraqed • 13 years ago

10 2 13 years ago

news.cnet.com

devx• 13 years ago

So in this case letting Google analyze the data really is wiretapping [1].

I understand there can be tremendous benefits in letting companies analyze all sorts of data on us, and then letting them spit back useful services for us. However, if we're going to go along with all of this, then we'd better have some very strong national and international laws to protect us against government abuses in simply lifting data of millions of people at a time, or simply targetting various people, whether nationally or internationally, without very strong oversight and a clear record of what happened, who did it, and why they did it.

Otherwise, companies like Google, by collecting so much data on us and keeping it for so long, are just making it extremely easy and trivial for governments to abuse their power.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/technology/google-accused-...

anxiousest• 13 years ago

First of all let's not confuse the issues here, the one in question is about tagging visitors with cookies, and the one you link to is a terrible decision by a judge about the nature of data processing in the cloud with the potential to adversely affect all tech corps and startups and further enrich leech trial lawyers. Here are some opinions by those who know the law much better that myself:

http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/04/is-gmail-illegal/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/28...

It’s just an awful decision.

Back to the cookie thing, the technique described is not exclusive to national agencies, any black hat with gumption can manage it (although the NSA taps teleco traffic which makes it much easier for them) the attack vector in this case is a vulnerability in the Tor browser that ought not have been there in the first place (rather than any data analysis) and I'm guessing it was already patched seeing as the documents describing it are a bit dated.

It’s not a kickoff point to philosophise about the merits of free services and the legality of hadoop. Also "companies like Google" aren't the ones that came up with terrible laws nor should they stop building stuff because of them.

NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

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