Want To Be An NSA Target? Just Try Looking For Tools To Protect Your Online Privacy

As revelations of government surveillance continue to leak out, many Americans have become alarmed about their online privacy. Most have done very little to address these concerns for a few reasons 1) there is a degree of technical savvy required to use and understand things like encrypted email, TOR, and alternative operating systems like Linux; and 2) the NSA promises they’re only going after the bad guys!

There’s also the fact that as more and more stories of NSA privacy breaches come out, trying to recapture your privacy can seem downright futile. If that sounds like you, a report released last week from the German media outlet Tagesschau shows you don’t know how right you are. Turns out, simply researching tools like the TOR encryption network can get you targeted for “deep packet inspection,” which includes your emails, searches and browsing history. (Basically, everything you do online.)

 If you are located outside of the U.S., Canada, the U.K. or one of the so-called Five Eyes countries partnering with the NSA in its surveillance efforts, then visiting the TOR website triggers an automatic fingerprinting. In other words, simply investigating privacy-enhancing methods from outside of the United States is an act worthy of scrutiny and surveillance. Another infraction: hating Windows.

If you visit the forum page for the popular Linux Journal, dedicated to the open-source operating system Linux, you could be fingerprinted regardless of where you live because the XKeystore source code designates the Linux Journal as an “extremist forum.” Searching for the Tails, operating system, another Windows alternative popular among human rights watchers, will also land you on the deep-packet inspectee list.

The NSA is able to do this through the use of one of its surveillance tools, XKeyscore, revealed  last year by Edward Snowden. A group of experts working with Tagesschau examined the XKeyscore source code and found that “nine servers running TOR, including one at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, were under constant NSA surveillance.” They also found automatic triggers in the code to add you to NSA surveillance for simply visiting sites like the Linux forum.

Think that sounds nuts? Author and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow agrees.

Tor and Tails have been part of the mainstream discussion of online security, surveillance and privacy for years. It’s nothing short of bizarre to place people under suspicion for searching for these terms.

More importantly, this shows that the NSA uses “targeted surveillance” in a way that beggars common sense. It’s a dead certainty that people who heard the NSA’s reassurances about “targeting” its surveillance on people who were doing something suspicious didn’t understand that the NSA meant people who’d looked up technical details about systems that are routinely discussed on the front page of every newspaper in the world…

One expert suggested that the NSA’s intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats — to split the entire population of the Internet into “people who have the technical know-how to be private” and “people who don’t” and then capture all the communications from the first group.

If you’re still buying the line that “you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’re not doing anything wrong”, you’re seriously missing the point. We should all find this chilling. We just celebrated 238 years of America; we batted around words like ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, and ‘greatest nation of Earth’. Is it too much to ask that our government live up to those words?

By: Sandi Behrns

Sandi Behrns is a noted policy nerd, new media & web developer, and consultant to progressive organizations and campaigns. She is a senior contributor to Liberaland, and the Executive Editor of Progressive Congress News.