Snowden Documents Reveal Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks

&gt; One classified document shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.<p>This is <i>real-time surveillance</i> of website visitors &amp; search terms to websites that governments don&#x27;t like. I&#x27;m guessing it wouldn&#x27;t take much for them to correlate those visitors to IP addresses, cookies, device IDs and cell tower signals to pinpoint people in real time too?<p><i>Knock knock</i><p>Who is it?<p><i>It&#x27;s the police. We know you&#x27;re browsing Wikileaks right now.</i><p>Edit: Looks like GCHQ&#x27;s &quot;ANTICRISIS GIRL&quot; [0], the tool used to monitor Wikileaks visitors in real time, was based on Piwik [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/2014/02/piwik2.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org&#x2F;wp-uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;pi...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://piwik.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;piwik.org&#x2F;</a>

&gt;Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, the documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign “branches” of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name.<p>Good to know that the NSA is on top of that Pirate Bay threat! I was worried for a little bit. Good thing they&#x27;re keeping tabs on script kiddies too. And of course WikiLeaks; that&#x27;s just information terrorism. Better go ahead and classify them all as malicious foreign actors:<p>&gt;any communication with a group designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.<p>&gt;When NSA officials are asked in the document if WikiLeaks or Pirate Bay could be designated as “malicious foreign actors,” the reply is inconclusive: “Let us get back to you.” There is no indication of whether either group was ever designated or targeted in such a way.<p>Knowing Greenwald, I&#x27;ve got a suspicion that he already knows the answer to that question. Gonna go grab some popcorn. Y&#x27;all want anything from the concession stand?<p>EDIT:<p>Notice of course that it doesn&#x27;t really matter if the NSA classifies any of them as malicious foreign actors or not. They can always count on the GCHQ to scrape up US citizens&#x27; data for them:<p><a href="https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/2014/02/piwik2.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org&#x2F;wp-uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;pi...</a><p>That blue spot on the &quot;Visitor Countries&quot; map looks familiar...

Now we know what we&#x27;ve speculated darkly about all long: the NSA and GCHQ actively track users who visit sites they don&#x27;t like.<p>Presumably your visit to The Intercept and First Look are similarly tracked and correlated with your other online and offline activity.<p>I for one will visit this site and open every linked document from each IP I have access to. These tactics of mass surveillance and intimidation must be resisted.

I don&#x27;t know about you guys, but these two quotes together with the events in the life of Assange seems to paint some picture.<p><i>According to the Post, officials “realized that they have what they described as a ‘New York Times problem’” – namely, that any theory used to bring charges against Assange would also result in criminal liability for the Times, The Guardian, and other papers which also published secret documents provided to WikiLeaks.</i><p><i>USA [...] urged other nations with forces in Afghanistan [...] to consider filing criminal charges against J.A. [...] focus the legal elements of national power upon non-state actor Assange, and the human network that supports Wikileaks</i> (from <a href="https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/2014/02/assange_pressure.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org&#x2F;wp-uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;as...</a>)<p>Not that this came as a surprise for people who read things outside NYT.

I am not surprised one bit.<p>Not directly related to the article, but more to the issue at large: One thing many people fail to realize is that humans can be terribly, terribly corrupt. There are those among us who, without a drop of guilt or compassion, would take the life of another. Given the means, we are capable of carrying out some heinous acts. Many believe that there is some moral or ethical boundary that these spy agencies will not cross. That given all the information that&#x27;s been leaked, all the lies that&#x27;ve been exposed, there is still an area of corrupt behavior that is off-limits.<p>I have no doubt in my mind that there are those within these agencies that have abused their access to information for political, financial, and personal benefit, eg insider trading, selling damaging information to political candidates, suppressing journalists, etc. I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;ll ever be brought to the public light, but I&#x27;m certain it&#x27;s happened and is happening. The stuff that we read about is peanuts.

I find it really interesting that a huge number of GCHQ internal training documents, giving away an awful lot about their operations and systems, was available on demand with no logging to poorly vetted contractors at US sites. They don&#x27;t even know what he took. Contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton are a huge, soft target with a constantly changing roster of workers.<p>That lack of any significant firewall between the allies, combined with a huge army of contractors in the US with top secret access, means China&#x2F;Russia etc have probably had access to this information for years, if not decades, and could feed CGHQ and the NSA misinformation at will, because they&#x27;ll know exactly what their capabilities and aspirations are.

These findings illustrate the difference between <i>surveillance</i> and a <i>surveillance state</i>. The GCHG and by relation the NSA had plenty of information about who visited or donated to Wikileaks, but did not act on any of that information [1]. These documents could easily be construed as a vote of confidence for the agencies in question. People love to throw around the phrase &quot;Orwellian&quot; these days, but his seminal work does not appear to be relevant here. We all know that the government could be surveilling us at any time. We should all be afraid of it taking widespread action based upon that information. This day has not come yet.<p>The government can listen to what you say and watch what you do all they want. The moment they move from surveilling to censoring, from watching to interfering, the average citizen will come down on them with righteous fury. No one is coming to your door or telling you what lawful websites you can and can&#x27;t look at or what you can say to people. It&#x27;s a testament to the strength of our ideals that government agents can tap your phone and hear you say how much you hate them, and yet still not lift a finger against you [1].<p>Keeping an eye on quasi-legal websites and organizations is the government&#x27;s job. Using force to harm them is a line that we cannot allow them to cross. There are many, many more documents that have yet to come to light and I&#x27;m sure that this community will be the first to point out any serious abuses of power.<p>[1] <i>&quot;That we know of&quot;</i>

&quot;discovering that an American has been selected for surveillance must be mentioned in a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”&quot;<p>This is so bad. Just when you think it can&#x27;t get any worse.<p>The worst part is that more leaks with probably even more depressing revalations are on the way.

Who gave the order to monitor Wikileaks and its visitors? What I&#x27;d like to see <i>at the very least</i> is that these agencies get reformed to the point where if we do find out about an abuse of theirs, we can put pressure on the so called &quot;oversight committees&quot; who clearly aren&#x27;t doing their jobs, to uncover exactly who monitored Wikileaks and who gave the order to do it. And then fire them.<p>Right now even if there was such a pressure on them, there&#x27;s probably no way to link to who did it, because NSA and GCHQ seem to be run in a very chaotic way and that&#x27;s on purpose, so there are no ties for specific operations to anyone.

I guess that bitcoin donation to wikileaks I sent a few years back means I should probably dump my computer&#x27;s bios and ssd firmware physically out of flash with a logic analyzer and compare it with others of the same model.<p>Fuck.

Ah, page 19 (18 for context) of this presentation is kind of interesting:<p><a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/02/18/psychology-new-kind-sigdev/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstlook.org&#x2F;theintercept&#x2F;document&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;psych...</a><p>Firefox: browser of choice for neurotic introverts!<p>(I use Firefox:)<p>Actually that whole slide deck is interesting. Watch how &quot;Squeaky Dolphin&quot; help us go from &quot;real-time&quot; monitoring of likes on facebook and youtube&#x2F;blogger views to splunk powered(?)[1] &quot;Battle Damage Assessment Demonstrator - City Activity&quot;...<p>[1] Slide 26-32. Splunk is namedropped, wonder if NSA are big customers of <a href="http://www.splunk.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.splunk.com</a> ? I guess all PR is good PR...

Related:<p>The Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders has the U.S. ranked #46 in their 2004 report [0] - just above Haiti and just below Romania.<p>[0] <a href="http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rsf.org&#x2F;index2014&#x2F;en-index2014.php</a>

Are we surprised by this?<p>What Snowden taught us, the lesson we all have now, is that those with that level of internet&#x2F;computer skills are not citizens of a single country but RATHER citizens of the Internet and its our actions that determine the future of the internet and its freedom.

That screenshot of how they tracked WikiLeaks visitors... isn&#x27;t that Piwik?<p>Edit: Oh never mind, should have kept on reading.

Piwik works in the same way as Google Analytics and uses an injected JavaScript to report the stats back to the server. If they didn&#x27;t modify Piwik a lot it means that the script should be visible and the address of the server too.<p>Just tested, not seeing any suspicious JavaScript tags from inside the UK.

The interesting thing is this is getting massive headlines here, but when the IRS targets conservative groups, there&#x27;s barely a peep.<p>I&#x27;d say government overreach is starting to get to a fever pitch. People have good reason to fear their government and that&#x27;s pretty scary.