XKEYSCORE

XKEYSCORE, What is it? - the secret program run by the NSA on the World Wide Web that converts all the data it can see into searchable events like web pages loaded, files downloaded, forms submitted, emails and attachments sent, porn videos watched, TV shows streamed, and advertisements loaded, which demonstrates how Internet traffic can be even more sensitive than phone calls.

What does it do? - It collects in bulk virtually all of our phone metadata.  If you call a suicide prevention hotline, it hears your call, and converts your voice call into readable language. HIV testing services, phone sex services, advocacy groups for gun rights and for abortion rights, all recorded and noted. Calling your girlfriend while out of the house for a secret tryst?
Schedule a job interview without letting your current employer know? Long Distance calls? Most of us, at one point or another, have spent hours on the phone discussing the most intimate details about our lives. There isn’t anyone alive today who didn’t grow up with at least some access to a telephone, we understand them well.

But we don't quite get the internet, do we? We don't actually realize what we are telling that listener in a darkened room. Bulk collection of phone metadata is, without a doubt, a violation of your privacy, but bulk surveillance of internet traffic is orders of magnitude more invasive!
We inadvertently share even more intimate details through online searches. The NSA’s programs tap the Internet directly and collect data, illegally violating your right to privacy. If government wants to search or seize your data, they must have a warrant. The warrant can only be issued if they have probable cause, and the warrant must be specific. Meaning the searchers who want to go through your data, literally all of it, need to suspect you of something before being allowed to. That is the law. But as it stands right now, the government can simply gather everything you do on the internet, then look for a violation of some law, or just wait until you do commit a crime, or until they need to suspect you of one. We are talking about a different law here.

How does Xkeyscore and other surveillance programs do it? All internet traffic travels through an international lacy maze of routes throughout the world.
For instance, an email message sent from Abbotsford, BC to Vancouver begins in British Columbia and ends in Canada, yet is routed through San Jose, San Francisco, Kansas City and Chicago. An email sent from Moscow, Russia, passes off to Frankfurt, Germany then Stockholm, Sweden before reaching its destination a few miles away in Yaroslavl, Russia.
A message from Mexico to Washington might be hijacked and sent through London and Moscow before being read in Washington. After having been captured en route!
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany is still pissed at the USA over them spying on her, as are most other European countries. Many are accusing the US of using their spying abilities to give private American companies the advantage on international contracts! Dilma Rouseff, President of Brazil, was so infuriated by NSA spying that she is laying her own TransAtlantic cable to Europe!

There can be intercept points anywhere. And in some cases, so called splitters are implanted along those electronic routes that siphon off copies of everything along the line. Just like a wire tap might do. Better because Xkeyscore doesn't get distracted. But wiretaps are medieval science compared to what happens today. The NSA is capable of collecting and storing all information traveling electronically from anywhere to anywhere every second of every day and stored in the new NSA facility in Utah. Where everything you have ever typed, and everything anyone else has ever typed about you, can be cross-referenced. The NSA can profile you better than your own mother.

And many other government agencies in the USA and your country too, are using these kinds of surveillance and collecting systems. PRISM is a government code name for a data-collection effort. It collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google. your internet history! Documents indicate that PRISM is the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports, and it accounts for 91% of the NSA's internet traffic acquired! Finfisher is another that infiltrates your computer. And the Hacking Team sounds like someone who would hack government computers like Anonymous, but it is exactly the opposite, a private company selling software that that hacks YOU under a government's control. Any despotic regime who will buy it!  (do we still hate WikiLeaks when they recently hacked the Hacking Team and revealed flaws in that architecture and their nefarious deals?) And there are likely hundreds more electronics watching you now, in service of various government agencies. With enough cross-referencing to reveal your toe fungus!
Do a search, get collected. Even if your shaky fingers get the search wrong and you end up at Madame Meralda's House of Chains and Pains, that is now part of YOUR intimate internet history. The faulty-fingered keystroke will be remembered. Forever.

And quit that old dog about, "I have nothing to fear because I'm not doing anything wrong." You don't know who is defining 'wrong'! Apple said years ago it had never heard of Prism.  Sure, believe an Apple IT guy didn't KNOW? Unlikely. President Ronald Reagan in 1981 authorized foreign intelligence investigations. Every one knew. And didn't these corporate execs pay any attention to the Snowden revelations?

But it is not just Google. AT&T is cooperating with the illegal surveillance. Undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers and provides those copies to the NSA.
But that is not new, General David Sarnoff, in 1941 as President of the Radio Corporation of America, agreed to illegally pass on all Japanese Consulate cable messages to Naval Intelligence.

A FISA court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) order demands Verizon turn over all customer phone records including who is talking to whom, when and for how long to the NSA. This metadata, especially when collected in bulk and aggregated, allows the government to track the associations of various political and religious organizations. Praise the Lord? Maybe not. Vote for who? Dangerous.
FISA courts are held in complete secret. You do NOT get a lawyer. You do NOT question witnesses. You cannot cross-examine. You cannot verify the evidence against you. And you do not face your accuser.

The world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007/ Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype etc.  Collectively, these companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

Think a new US president would be different? The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under President Obama in December 2012. Who can you trust?


And do you still believe these government snoops are keeping you safe? The standard buzz-phrase for all this finaglery. The chief of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, after being pressed by the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA gathering of every single phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two. (after others glibly told us there were 54) So after gathering possibly trillions of bytes about what we are doing, all that stolen info translated into only two plots?
(They are now gathering info in Exabytes, which is a 1, followed by 18 zeros. And amounts to all words ever spoken by human beings!)


Remember those movies about Moscow or East Berlin during the Cold War? Where you went out to a park and whispered to your friend to avoid bugs planted in your own apartment by the Stasi?
It is almost here folks, and you're not the handsome third-man Orson Wells disappearing into the murky black shadows in Vienna. Nothing glamorous about losing your freedom. Now the shadowy figure in your movie hiding in between the cracks on your keyboard is called Xkeyscore. And it is looking out at you through your own webcam and listening to what you say and recording where you go on the electronic media.

You're the victim. Don't meet under trees or on park benches, they're probably already there.



Source of some info: Micah Lee, The Intercept. 


The Intercept    The news service of investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Citizen Four streaming   Laura Poitras'  academy award winning documentary about Edward Snowden.
thoughtmaybe  Plenty of browsing here.