NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

http://www.techspot.com/news/57316-nsa-classifies-linux-journal-readers-tor-and-tails-linux-users-as-extremists.html

by jtsagata • 12 years ago

133 62 12 years ago

mariusz79• 12 years ago

I guess the first issue of LJ I have on the bookshelf just doubled in value..

userbinator2• 12 years ago

"the agency is targeting anyone who is interested in online privacy" - not so surprising, is it. I wonder what other similar criteria there are for being considered an "extremist"? No Facebook or other social networking accounts? Uses Linux? Makes certain types of comments online that support privacy (like this one)? ... It's really unsettling.

On the other hand, now that this is out, I think the NSA will suddenly have a ton more "extremists" to look at.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

NSA will suddenly have a ton more "extremists" to look at.

Let's say that in NSA's dictionary, extremist means "Anyone with even a small potential to alter the course of society, the economy, or technology."

Those people, plus a comfortable margin, might be 5% of the population. The NSA probably has the resources to examine all the electronic communications and do high-quality transcription of verbal communications of that 5%.

Even trying to make that targeting more selective would be, in the NSA's worldview "counterproductive."

moron4hire• 12 years ago

I'm always curious to hear people talk about "alter the course of society" or "change culture" or whatever, what they think that means. What does the NSA think is the "course" of things? Because ultimately, I see it as a tautology: the course is whatever it is, it is whatever the aggregate of its constituents make it. So please, tell us NSA, what prescience do you have to know what it should and shouldn't be?

gaius3• 12 years ago

More likely it means, anyone who isn't an employee of the NSA.

danielharan• 12 years ago

They don't need to transcribe. So-called "metadata" is what you'd be analyzing even if you had transcripts.

Excavator• 12 years ago

So now they can legally do targeted investigations of even more people, or was that the FBI who needed their victims to fulfil one of a set of specific criteria? (Such as being n social steps from another victim.)

jl6• 12 years ago

The NSA's problem is that new threats are a form of innovation, but that it's hard to predict innovation, and harder to target surveillance towards people planning a dangerous activity if nobody has seen that activity before. New ideas are a threat.

So perhaps their method is to define Normal, and then monitor everybody Abnormal, on the basis that dangerous innovation is more likely to come from the Abnormal.

Enthusiasm for Linux isn't as abnormal as it used to be, but it definitely puts you in the "dangerous 1%".

throwwit• 12 years ago

You made sense until the "...definitely puts you in..." part

_wp3r4• 12 years ago

I could see a group of analyst deducting that people interested in traffic privacy fall into two groups. Technology intent and nefarious intent. If you were looking for people with nefarious intent, then that would lead you to monitor the tools that those in the nefarious group would use. This article feels very much like link bait for the technology activist.

You don't put a DUI checkpoint outside the library you put it outside the pub.

My point being that they tasked intelligent people with finding "terrorist" and this search pattern is a natural evolution of that task. Policy aside.

EthanHeilman2• 12 years ago

But what if they view the technologists as "incidentally" aiding the group with "nefarious intent". Remember a US president in our lifetime said: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."[1]

The treatment of Jacob Appelbaum[2] and David Miranda[3] suggests that members of US/UK Government may believe that if one provides "incidental help" to the current ideological enemies of the US you are a terrorist/extremist or at the very least targetable under terrorism laws (Miranda was detained under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act).

[1] http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/200...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Detention_and_i...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#Detention_of_Da...

noir_lord6• 12 years ago

The depressing part for me is that I've started to consider what I search for on a daily basis and how that might look...essentially they are starting to make me paranoid.

Over the last few months I've googled

Numerous Weapon Systems (I have a fascination with WW1, WWII and Cold War history - stuff like Black Arrow etc).

Insurgencies during the British Empire

Electronics (want to get back into and saw a fun project to make on reddit the other day) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=movVFYWheGM

Linux stuff (settings, security, the usual stuff a developer/system administrator would look at).

Programming stuff (relating to security, encryption etc)

NSA related material (following the story closely).

Setting up a VPN (so I can access Netflix US because Netflix UK is basically crap).

The US constitution and some case law.

NSA Report: "User noir_lord has an interest in privacy, weapons, insurgencies and excellent technical skills, user noir_lord should be monitored"

Where in reality I'm a 34 year old web developer from the North of England who enjoys history, techy stuff and playing with my cats.

pling• 12 years ago

Well you're in the same club as most of us.

Reminds me of: http://youtu.be/-PSeAfSKQe4

noir_lord6• 12 years ago

That video is amazing, I've always liked Pink Floyd's "The Wall" so I'm a bit ashamed I've never seen the full video version.

The imagery is chill inducingly powerful.

drdaeman• 12 years ago

Well, a good side of it - the more false positives they have, the worse for them.

noir_lord6• 12 years ago

If you assume their goal is to do what they claim it is.

If not then false positives are largely irrelevant.

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

That is one way that thought control works.

Religion uses this, "don't think naughty thoughts, God will record it and you'll pay for it later". NSA is God except that NSA exists and is real.

Here your search is a bit like your thoughts. Any of those things you listed, possibly could have landed you on the "naughty list". So now you start to really worry about what you search for. If you can't research or find info about, well might as well not think about things at all at some point.

Before you used to go to the library. Except that they can monitor that too and it is terribly inefficient.

I grew up in Soviet Union and I remember being told by my parents not to mention or talk about certain things (criticizing the party, telling jokes about politics around strangers, ..., and so on). But at least you knew, if you are in the country side with your family you could crack jokes at the stupidity of bureaucracy. And then when I came here the big "selling" point of the country was "you have all this freedom, and this is something you really need, want and is the best thing in the world". But just like you, I started in the last 3-5 years to kind of think for a second before searching for things. Or when I write an email to a friend, I am careful if I am a bit too sarcastic or making a joke about the president or whatnot.

Not saying we'll end up in a labor camp anytime soon, but the tragedy is that this kind of control and monitoring so disturbing vis-a-vis propaganda and the expectations of what this country should be. In totalitarian regimes at least it is clear and understandable what is going on and what is expected of people. Here it is "freedom, dreams, realize yourself, pursue your happiness" but effectively what we think about is restricted.

noir_lord6• 12 years ago

Thanks for the interesting post, as I mentioned in the first post I have a fascination for 19th and 20th century history and the parallels to some of it are horribly stark (so stark in fact I can't believe that the people in power haven't spotted them which leaves me with "this is what they want").

Secret courts, no right to due process, no right to face your accuser, the presumption of guilt on political grounds, secret warrants, an out of control security apparatus, extra judicial killings, curtailing on the right to free protest, right to free speech...

Thanks to our reliance on modern communications and technology the state apparatus can assemble data warehouses that the most optimistic of STASI operatives wouldn't have even dreamed possible and we seem to be sleep walking into a police state more pervasive and insidious than anything we've ever seen.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

throwawaykf052• 12 years ago

The flaw in the "thought control" premise is that the NSA never intended their monitoring to be revealed, so you'd never restrict your thoughts.

Unless... Snowden is an NSA operation to subtly begin exerting thought control! Brilliant! Now that I think about it, "Snowden" even sounds like a codename for an NSA operation.

gaius3• 12 years ago

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu

Create• 12 years ago

An institution directed at the control of thought in the European world, based around weekly surveillance of the conduct and thoughts of every human being. Based around the censorship of all reading material and in the end based upon the ability to predict and to punish unorthodox thought.

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999

thibauts• 12 years ago

This is censorship by terror.

GHFigs7• 12 years ago

You're nuts if you think there's significant overlap between yours and the activities of the people responsible for things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_20...

noir_lord6• 12 years ago

Don't tell me, tell the intelligence services as they are the ones who don't know that.

busterarm• 12 years ago

So the NSA is nuts then? Because that's what this leak seems to be implying.

I have some pretty strange internet searches as well, but the cat is already out of the bag on that one I guess.

ekianjo• 12 years ago

NSA Report: "User noir_lord has an interest in privacy, weapons, insurgencies and excellent technical skills, user noir_lord should be monitored"

You've got the right profile to be a "collateral damage" in case something goes wrong around you.

stordoff• 12 years ago

A few months ago, I spend a good hour or so googling and reading about Anthrax strains, dispersal, etc. after seeing something about it on TV and getting curious.

I realised afterwards it might look a tad suspicious if NSA/GCHQ/etc. picked up on it. Oh well.

javert• 12 years ago

While there is no word about how the source code was obtained, security experts aren't sure whether it was leaked by Snowden.

So we don't really know if it's genuine. (Though it doesn't really matter because it's not surprising at all.)

srean2• 12 years ago

What I am really keen to know is whether revelations like these have any impact on the "would love to work for the NSA fanboy". Do they continue to be just as keen and rationalize these things away, or does it make them ponder a bit.

Things have indeed been getting scarier by the minute. Interest in Linux is not treason, yet, but I cannot/dont rule out that it could be, for some value of 'Linux'.

Several trends in political/informatic/economic structures does seem to be headed towards the medieval side.

Double_Cast• 12 years ago

I briefly met a guy who worked for US intelligence (can't remember specifics). I asked him about the NSA. First, he told me he couldn't say much. Then he said "Well I don't wanna brag, but the NSA really has caught a lot of terrorists, and is way more competent than the media makes them out to be." This leads me to believe that either: all these press articles paint a distorted picture; or the level of rationalization is pretty high.

ollysb• 12 years ago

It also makes you wonder what those "terrorists" had actually done to warrant being captured.

antman• 12 years ago

I have also heard many cases of terrorists being caught but most of them were simply searching on the Interner about it and some agent showed up and provided them with moral support the means and opportunity to attempt something thus becoming a terrorist. Indeed there have been many arrests. But most of then were not active terrorists before meeting with the agent. But they were terrorists in the legal sense of the term, since thinking about terrorism makes you a terrorist.

IgorPartola• 12 years ago

Oh shit. I had two articles published in it last year. What does that make me?!

On a LUG mailing list I belong to we started using the term "command line extremist". I rather like it.

esbonsa2• 12 years ago

since their goal doesn't appear to be to stop "terrorists", is their goal to stop unwanted politicians?

esbonsa2• 12 years ago

if I was the NSA I probably would target my own employees first as they have the most power to take me down

contingencies• 12 years ago

Your employees have probably already been screened as risk averse nerds without a social life outside of the near area. Sure, you'd monitor their movements and those of their family members, but statistically it'd be unlikely they'd move too far from a pretty boring norm. After all, they're prohibited from visiting interesting countries and are probably watched or flagged if they visit even other US states. Is it unlikely that their movements are not routinely monitored by cellular site presence and/or numberplate recognition?

I think you would target high ranking politicians... because the option to blackmail them ensures you an uninterrupted and growing black budget.

You would target communications businesses... because compromising a properly placed employee grants you access to the sum total of customer and peer communications through their networks.

You would target media... because a jump on a popular change in public sentiment is very actionable intelligence, both to multiply funding (through investments prior to predictable market response), and to further control politics.

You would target diplomats... both for tradition's sake, and because borders are the most easily grasped us-and-them (divisive) tool in the post 20th century semantic playground, giving you options for powerful public sentiment manipulation through selective media generation. However, realistically for most embassies worth their salt you'd know these groups are largely not going to do anything remotely surprising that you can pin to them through pervasive communications intelligence gathering.

Probably also, you would target multinationals, because almost all of them are doing something dodgy, somewhere, and that gives you tremendous leeway for behavioral modification.

But in reality, the majority of these can be monitored very effectively on an automated basis with near zero effort once you have full visibility of various domestic financial networks, the SWIFT international financial network, credit and debit card networks, electronic information on intended travel (passenger name records) and border crossing (whoops! I-lost-my ... new passport number, anyone?), and the public switched telephone network.

Email, social network and general web use are cute extras, and probably greatly useful just for delving in to people's character and actions, communicative profiling (grammar, typing style, languages known), interest profiling, waking hour and social network profiling (beyond just phones), etc. But I don't think it's necessary to go to that point most of the time ... the broad metrics are already available and probably extremely reliable unless people are making a concerted effort to bypass dragnet surveillance activity. (eg. By avoiding all of the above networks... damn hard these days, it would seem, for any length of time)

GHFigs7• 12 years ago

Nowhere in the evidence is there any indication that the NSA classifies Linux Journal as an extremist forum, or that it considers the readers extremists.

mhurron• 12 years ago

You're right, they just monitor and log everything and everyone on Linux Journals forums.

We really should stop saying the NSA's targets are considered extremists. They watch everyone.

GHFigs7• 12 years ago

You're right, they just monitor and log everything and everyone on Linux Journals forums.

That's a contradiction. If you believe the latter, you don't think I'm right.

kps2• 12 years ago

Another repeat of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983124

And to repeat: the config file available from http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/xkeyscorerules100.txt says:

  /*
  These variables define terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic
  Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by
  extremists on extremist forums.
  */

Linux Journal is listed there, as a ‘website relating to TAILS’, not as an ‘extremist forum’.

krapp• 12 years ago

specifically:

    // START_DEFINITION
    /*
    These variables define terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic
    Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by
    extremists on extremist forums.
    */

    $TAILS_terms=word('tails' or 'Amnesiac Incognito Live System') and word('linux'
    or ' USB ' or ' CD ' or 'secure desktop' or ' IRC ' or 'truecrypt' or ' tor ');
    $TAILS_websites=('tails.boum.org/') or ('linuxjournal.com/content/linux*');
    // END_DEFINITION

... assuming this file is even what it purports to be.

I understand Hacker News users aren't likely to think critically when it comes to stories about the NSA but you would expect more of them could actually read code.

kps2• 12 years ago

Really that should be

  TAILS_terms=(word('tails')
               and word('linux' or ' USB ' or ' CD'
                        or 'secure desktop' or ' IRC '
                        or 'truecrypt' or ' tor '))
           or word('Amnesiac Incognito Live System');

because (1) you need to disambiguate the common word 'tails' but surely not the specific name 'Amnesiac Incognito Live System', and (2) you don't want to miss [tails CDROM].

See how important code review is?

dm2• 12 years ago

I didn't realize that he had actually leaked any code: http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/xkeyscorerules100.txt

Is there a list of other code or rules files that were released?

Is this information legal to search for, store, or link to since it's now public?

wyck• 12 years ago

What about SELinux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

"The SELinux project was merged into the Linux Kernel back in 2003"

It's still listed on the NSA website in several areas: http://www.nsa.gov/research/_files/selinux/papers/x/x.shtml

To be honest though, if someone was downloading tails from region of know terrorist activity and such systems are actively promoted amongst terrorist sites then it obviously makes for a good target. But the Linux Journal ..comon.

NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

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