How The NSA Collects Your Internet Data In Four Charts

When it blew the lid open on the NSA domestic spying scandal in conjunction with the Guardian, the Washington Post released the first batch of slides revealing the preliminary details of which Internet firms cooperate in secret with the NSA, unleashing a firestorm of lies and denials by these same private companies (not to mention the administration), whose collaboration with the US government was subsequently revealed to be of symbiotically and mutually beneficial (think massive government contracts and classified data kickbacks in exchange for confidential customer data).

Last night, WaPo released the latest batch of slides given to it by Edward Snowden who appears to have been very busy downloading as much internal NSA info as he could, during his three months at Booz. This time we learn all about the PRISM "tasking" process - or the detail of how the NSA goes about "incidentally" spying on America's citizens (because as much as it is a headline grabber, the NSA spying on the EU, the G-20, and other non-US entities, is after all its job).

From the WaPo:

Acquiring data from a new target

This slide describes what happens when an NSA analyst "tasks" the PRISM system for information about a new surveillance target. The request to add a new target is passed automatically to a supervisor who reviews the "selectors," or search terms. The supervisor must endorse the analyst's "reasonable belief," defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection.

Analyzing information collected from private companies

After communications information is acquired, the data are processed and analyzed by specialized systems that handle voice, text, video and "digital network information" that includes the locations and unique device signatures of targets.

Each target is assigned a case notation

The PRISM case notation format reflects the availability, confirmed by The Post's reporting, of real-time surveillance as well as stored content.

Searching the PRISM database

On April 5, according to this slide, there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in PRISM's counterterrorism database. The slide does not show how many other Internet users, and among them how many Americans, have their communications collected "incidentally" during surveillance of those targets.

Comments

[Trampy]

http://www.eurasiareview.com/30062013-washington-post-ignores-threat-to-national-security-and-publishes-new-nsa-slides-oped/

Home

Washington Post Ignores Threat To National Security And Publishes New NSA Slides – OpEd

June 30, 2013

By Paul Woodward

Back in early June when the Washington Post published four slides from the NSA’s PowerPoint presentation on PRISM, reporter Barton Gellman wrote: “If you saw all the slides you wouldn’t publish them” — even though Edward Snowden had pressed the Post to publish all 41 slides.

Now, in spite of Gellman’s insinuation that publication of any of the remaining slides could undermine national security, the Post has gone ahead and published four new slides.

Does this reflect newly found boldness on the part of the paper’s editors? Unlikely. Much more likely is that the Washington Post is now publishing classified information at the request of the NSA.

So, when the information in question is information the public needs to know, the Post is reluctant to publish it. But when the government decides that the release of the same information will now serve its own interests, then the Post is only too happy to oblige.

View profile and articles by Paul Woodward ?

[Trampy]

PGP should be used routinely by anyone who values their privacy.  It's lame scare-mongering in service of the Fourth Reich to suggest that using encryption would be detrimental to your freedom.  That suggestion is ass-backwards.

See these two sites for new versions of PGP freeware:

http://gnupg.org/

http://www.gpg4win.org/

For those who don't want to install any software, or first want to get an introduction to the concepts, you can try out PGP encryption using the web-based front-end at an on-line gold-exchange that's going out of business because they say BTC is better than micro-payments at their "gold exchange club." egolder built an HTML front-end for PGP for private communication with them about their gold account. igolder also gives instructions on how to configure SSL-protected access between your e-mail client and your e-mail server, because otherwise the e-mail header (to, from, subject) is transmitted in clear-text even if the message body is PGP-encrypted.  It's not a weakness of PGP, but users need to be aware and avoid putting confidential info on the subject line.

http://igolder.com/pgp/encryption/?to=iGolder

Contrary to what you might see, PGP 7.x and 8.x still work, if you know what you're doing.  The security holes in those versions are relatively minor unless you are exchanging PGP messages with a skilled attacker who can insert a DLL into their public key and you then insert that DLL into PGP itself somehow ... so it's not a good idea to use 7.x if you use PGP to communicate with everyone, which is impossible because hardly anyone uses PGP these days.

For one-click installation with hand-holding and tech support, new versions of PGP are sold as commercial off-the-shelf software here:

http://www.symantec.com/products-solutions/families/?fid=encryption

There is a large set of freeware versions for numerous OSs distributed by the GNU Privacy Guard project, which is sometimes called GPG:

http://gnupg.org/

Last but not least ... less than a month ago was released a brand-spanking new easy-install version of GnuPG targeting new Windows machines, including 64-bit. This was named Gpg4win; its development was supported by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) :

http://www.gpg4win.org/

If everyone used encryption, the world would be a safer place!

Big Mahalo to Phil Zimmerman (who wrote it in the first place), and Bruce Schneier (who reviewed the software line-by-line).