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 |  Subject: Snowden: your emails or Facebook profile can make you an NSA target  Wed Jul 10, 2013 12:47 am | |
| How does the National Security Agency choose who to target for surveillance?
"Normally you'd be specifically selected for targeting based on, for example, your Facebook or webmail content," whistleblower Edward Snowden told the German magazine Der Spiegel in an email interview. The discussion was held weeks before Snowden decided to step forward as the source of top secret documents that revealed wide-ranging surveillance programs.
Snowden's interview was conducted by Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who has worked withThe Guardian and The Washington Post in their coverage of the leaked documents, and Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher and a WikiLeaks associate. Poitras approached Appelbaum in mid-May; she wanted to send a series of questions to Snowden to see if he was a legit source.
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In the lengthy Q&A carried out over encrypted emails, Snowden said that one can be targeted because of his or her emails and Facebook profile, but didn't include any precise details of the inner workings. When asked what happens to targets, though, he revealed a bit more.
"They're just owned. An analyst will get a daily (or scheduled based on exfiltration summary) report on what changed on the system, PCAPS [abbreviation of the term "packet capture"] of leftover data that wasn't understood by the automated dissectors, and so forth," Snowden wrote.
"It's up to the analyst to do whatever they want at that point — the target's machine doesn't belong to them anymore, it belongs to the US government."
Snowden talked about the NSA in very critical terms. When asked who will be brought to justice after the NSA surveillance programs are revealed, Snowden responded, "In front of US courts? I'm not sure if you're serious [...] Who 'can' be brought up on charges is immaterial when the rule of law is not respected. Laws are meant for you, not for them."
The NSA leaker also revealed how the NSA "wants to be at the point where at least all of the metadata is permanently stored," emphasising the importance of metadata. "In most cases, content isn't as valuable as metadata because you can either re-fetch content based on the metadata or, if not, simply task all future communications of interest for permanent collection since the metadata tells you what out of their data stream you actually want," he explained.
The NSA isn't the only surveillance power that netizens should be worried about. Snowden explained in the interview that its allied counterparts from the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — part of the so-called Five-Eyes — "go beyond what NSA itself does."
The British spy agency GCHQ secretly taps fibre-optic cables through a surveillance program called Project Tempora, a report in The Guardian revealed. That procedure "snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive investigation without missing a single bit," Snowden wrote. "If you send a single ICMP packet 5 [referring to all data packets sent to or from Britain] and it routes through the UK, we get it. If you download something and the CDN (Content Delivery Network) happens to serve from the UK, we get it. If your sick daughter's medical records get processed at a London call center … well, you get the idea."
Can anyone escape the targeting? "As a general rule, so long as you have any choice at all, you should never route through or peer with the UK under any circumstances," Snowden wrote. "Their fibres are radioactive, and even the Queen's selfies to the pool boy get logged."
The interview touched on many subjects, often not directly related to NSA activities. For example, Snowden said that the United States and Israel worked together to develop Stuxnet, the computer virus that sabotaged Iran's nuclear facilities in 2008 or 2009. Neither the US nor Israel have confirmed creating Stuxnet, but the New York Times reported last year that the two countries worked closely to design the malware.
Mashable is the largest independent news source covering digital culture, social media and technology.
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/snowden-your-emails-or-facebook-profile-can-make-you-an-nsa-target-20130709-hv0ru.html |
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