NSA report

Wrote a 10 page report on the NSA and domestic spying for my college class. Enjoy phaggots.

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nsa pls go

post the contents in plaintext or get out.

Lance Brignoni
4/4/16

The Dangers of Mass Surveillance and Domestic Spying

Government surveillance poses a significant risk to basic rights to privacy and free speech and does nothing to prevent terrorism. It weakens encryption which makes your personal information less secure, it violates the United States Constitution, collects personally identifying metadata and hurts the economy as well as the individual. Furthermore we will dive into these subjects and others, including National Security Agency (NSA) bulk data collection, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and how it helps to protect your privacy and information, government back-doors in hardware and software, and how we can balance national security and privacy.
One of the NSA’s favorite strategies for facilitating domestic spying is weakening encryption standards and preventing its use. Encryption is the use of ciphers to scramble information, making it hard (or even impossible by today's standards) for anyone but the intended recipient to read. Encryption is important because it grants us the ability to securely do things online that we don’t want others to see. Examples of this would be purchasing something on Amazon without worrying that your personal information (credit card number, address, etc.) could be stolen, or sending a client important business or legal documents that could result in serious consequences if intercepted. “BULLRUN” (leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden), is one of the most famous decryption programs the NSA utilizes. To simplify the program, BULLRUN is designed to break certain forms of encryption, namely network-to-network (eg. the Internet) encryption protocols, such as the ones that allow you to bank online securely (Borger, Ball, & Greenwald, par. 28).

blaa blaa blaa blaa

Another program is the SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) Enabling Project, a program run by the NSA designed to “[i]nsert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT [Information Technology] systems, networks, and endpoint communications devices,” as well as “[i]nfluence policies, standards, and specification for commercial public key technologies” (Perlroth, par. 43). In a nutshell, what this means is that the NSA is working with technology corporations to implement backdoors (security holes designed to allow access to persons besides the end-user) in both their software and hardware that allows the collection of data before it can be encrypted, thus bypassing the entire point of encryption: to maintain secure and private communications.. Apart from being a massive invasion of privacy, these programs have real-world implications as well.
The purpose of a secure system is that it is in fact, secure; government back-doors are by definition, a security hole. This means that if other people (or worse, nation-states) find this hole, they can exploit it for their own personal gain. This happened recently in the case of Juniper Networks, a software company which was implicated in having a government backdoor in its firewall (a program that allows or refuses connections to and from a network) software. The backdoor was a snippet of code that would allow the interception and decryption of VPN (Virtual Private Network, a protocol that allows you to securely connect to another server to make it appear that you are connecting from a different place than you actually are) traffic. Many people rely on VPN software, such as persons in countries with oppressive regimes that persecute individuals for criticizing the government and whistle-blowers who want to anonymously leak information to outside media sources. This can also be as simple as someone wanting to do online banking at a coffee shop, as it encrypts data between you and the host, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks which can be used by an attacker on the same network as you. One way to combat government back-doors is using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS.)

FOSS software is software that has it’s source code released publicly and licensed as free (free as in freedom, not free as in beer), usually under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the Apache License (FSF, “GNU Public License”). Most of the licenses require the complete source code for the program, so that anyone can audit the code and run it themselves at home. This means that users can be sure that nothing malicious is going on behind the scenes and that the software is secure from both government and third-party back-doors. Some notable examples of FOSS software is the Linux kernel (which is used by 96.6% of web servers (OS Usage, chart 1) and runs the Android Operating System), OpenOffice, Firefox, VLC (media player), and GIMP (image editor, similar to photoshop). All of these products respect your privacy and support a secure and open internet. Most often, back-doors are seen in proprietary (any software without publicly released source-code) software, such as Microsoft’s Windows Operating System and other Microsoft products like SkyDrive and Outlook (Perlroth, par. 35). According to The Guardian, who obtained top-secret NSA and FBI documents from whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Microsoft granted the NSA access to all e-mail sent through the Outlook e-mail program before it could be encrypted. The NSA also has access to SkyDrive (a cloud storage service offered by Microsoft), including encryption keys (which are automatically backed up by Microsoft, thus essentially voiding their encryption) and all files users have backed up (Greenwald, Ackerman, Poitras, bullet 1).
The program that allows this massive breach of privacy goes by the code name PRISM (officially known as SIGAD US-984XN). PRISM is a clandestine mass surveillance program created by the NSA to allow bulk collection of communications through both the internet backbone (Comcast, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc.) and telecommunications services such as Verizon and AT&T (Greenwald & MacAskill, par. 2.) Using the PRISM program, Verizon Wireless is required to turn over the metadata (defined as “data that describes other data”) of every call and SMS (text message) to the NSA on a daily basis (Greenwald, “NSA Collecting”, par. 1.) Metadata doesn’t include the content of phone calls, but it does give information such as the length of the call, the numbers of all persons in a call, the GPS-calculated location of the person making and receiving the call, along with other information (Greenwald, par. 5.) This may not seem like a big deal to some people, but consider how anonymous metadata truly is. If someone outside a bar made five calls in a row at 2:00AM to their ex-husbands number, and left five consecutive voice-mails with an average voicemail duration of ten minutes apiece, you could infer what the content of those calls were. Edward Snowden once mused about the vast amounts of nude photographs him and other NSA contractors saw on a daily basis, and even commented that some contractors would laugh at and share American citizens private media among themselves (Farivar, “Snowden”, par. 5). Even if you don’t think you don’t have anything to hide, consider the fact that this domestic spying is occurring in your own home. Your children are constantly being mined for information, every meal you make, every television show you watch, and every phone call you make are all recorded (Ackerman & Thielman, par. 5).
Companies such as Samsung are beginning to use technology in their televisions that is constantly listening in via a microphone built into the TV sets. They use this data to give you more tailored ads in hopes of more targeting marketing. Your voice as well as the voice of anyone in the immediate area is sent to a third-party (in this case the company in question is Nuance) for voice recognition, who then returns that information back to Samsung (Schneier, para. 6.) Well that seems innocent enough (besides having someone constantly listening in on your every intimate conversation), right? It’s not.

Remember how we discussed government agencies tapping into the internet backbone to mass collect information? Well, as of 2014 (as far as we know, there are reports and rumors of this happening on a smaller scale before this) they can capture both live voice as it’s sent to the third party as well as text transcripts as it’s returned to Samsung. Samsung’s SmartTV privacy policy even states that consumers should “be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition” (Schneier, par. 8). I can only imagine George Orwell reading a current news article and comparing it to his 1949 dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, which contains an eerily similar passage in which “so long as [Winston] remained within the field of vision of [the television], he could be seen as well as heard” (Orwell, ch. 1, para. 5). This book was written before the internet, before the NSA was even founded, in an era where many people didn’t even own a television. Yet almost word for word, we’ve managed to allow our government to treat this book as more of a manual instead of a deterrent. Make no mistake, we live in a totalitarian society where every shred of privacy is handed over to the government because we cannot be trusted with our own thoughts. We try to simplify our lives by attempting to use technology at every opportunity available, but are we really ready to give up privacy in our own homes to have a toaster that checks our Facebook feeds for us (Ackerman & Thielman, par. 5). Most people would agree, regardless of political preference, that government should stay out of our personal lives and away from our private matters.
Others may argue that domestic spying saves American lives by preventing terrorism, which is the intended purpose of surveillance programs such as PRISM, Xkeyscore, Tempora, MUSCULAR, and Stateroom (Greenwald, “XKeyscore”). As going into each of these programs would take too long to discuss in this report, I invite you to conduct your own independent research into each program as per the citations. The bill that allows domestic spying in the first place is the USA PATRIOT Act, which we will focus on. The U.S. Government routinely cites that 54 terror plots have been thwarted by mass surveillance under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (which paved the way for domestic spying) (Cohn, par. 7). In reality, only 13 of those cases (and I call them cases because it was revealed that the majority of those were not actually plots) were intended to be carried out on U.S. soil (Cohn, par. 4.) The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an “independent, bipartisan agency within the executive branch” that was established “to review and analyze actions the executive branch takes to protect the Nation from terrorism” issued a report stating that “we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counter-terrorism investigation” (Cohn, par. 14). Furthermore, almost every one of those cases could have been prevented using existing tools provided by the Constitution, namely the Forth Amendment which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.

So how can we, as American citizens, protect ourselves from domestic spying? As stated earlier, Free and Open Source Software prevents giving the government access to our information in the first place, and ensures that neither the government nor third parties can access your private data. The first step would be to take action against the lawmakers and judges that allow this kind of behavior to continue. If we continue to vote for the same people who obviously have no concern for our rights and trample on our privacy, we won't see any change. We have rights given to us by the Fourth Amendment protecting us from unreasonable searches and seizures (US Const.).

The easiest step you can take to actively protect yourself is to use encryption. In recent years it's become ridiculously easy to encrypt your information, most devices and programs these days do it automatically. Whatsapp (an instant messaging application for smartphones) encrypts all messages by default. The latest versions of iOS for Apple iPhones includes encryption by default. Use the Firefox web browser, download the noscript plug-in (a plug-in that prevents often malicious closed-source javascript programs from running in your browser) along with the HTTPS Everywhere plug-in (a plug-in that automatically uses the SSL, or encrypted, version of every web page by default.) Using encryption not only protects your private and confidential information, but also lets the government know you value your privacy and aren't going to roll over and submit to them.
You can also check canarywatch.org, a site that logs all sites which use warrant canaries (as you cannot legally disclose that your website or application has been served a National Security Letter, which forces you to log and submit user information to the US government without notifying your users.) One of the best things you can do is donate to the EFF and FSF. These are two of the best organizations around when it comes to standing up for your rights, through awareness and legal battles, because they have excellent teams of lawyers who specialize in computer and network law. The EFF alone has won dozens of cases, including many cases that have made it all the way to the Supreme Court (Farivar, “EFF Cases”).
We need to stand up as a society and let our government know we aren't okay with the system currently in place. Nothing will change if we let them take away our rights and treat us all like criminals with no due process or warrants. We pay our taxes and the government answers to us, not the other way around. We are Americans, and this is the land of the free. We need to show our governing body that we care about our privacy and that we will not submit to such harmful invasions of privacy.

Works Cited
Ackerman, Spencer, and James Ball. “Optic Nerve: Millions of Yahoo Webcam Images Intercepted by GCHQ.” The Guardian News and Media, 28 Feb. 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Ackerman, Spencer, and Sam Thielman. "US Intelligence Chief: We Might Use the Internet of Things to Spy on You." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 09 Feb. 2016. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Borger, Julian, James Ball, and Glenn Greenwald. "Revealed: How US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Internet Privacy and Security." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 06 Sept. 2013. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.
Cohn, Cindy. "The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible." Electronic Frontier Foundation. Guardian News and Media, 02 June 2014. Web. 9 Apr. 2016.
Farivar, Cyrus. "Snowden: NSA Employees Routinely Pass around Intercepted Nude Photos." Ars Technica. WIRED Media, 17 July 2014. Web. 05 May 2016.
Farivar, Cyrus. "Here Are EFF’s Most Influential Cases from Its First 25 Years." Ars Technica. WIRED Media, 12 July 2015. Web. 05 May 2016.
"GNU General Public License V2.0 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation." GNU General Public License V2.0 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation. Free Software Foundation, June 1991. Web. 16 Apr. 2016.
Greenwald, Glenn, and Ewen MacAskill. "NSA Prism Program Taps in to User Data of Apple, Google and Others." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 07 June 2013. Web. 09 Apr. 2016.
Greenwald, Glenn. "NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 06 June 2013. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
Greenwald, Glenn. "XKeyscore: NSA Tool Collects 'nearly Everything a User Does on the Internet'" The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 31 July 2013. Web. 4 Apr. 2016.
Greenwald, Glenn, Spencer Ackerman, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill, and Dominic Rushe. "Microsoft Handed the NSA Access to Encrypted Messages." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 July 2013. Web. 07 Apr. 2016.
"OS Usage Trends and Market Share." OS Usage Trends and Market Share. W3Cook. Web. May 2016.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-four: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. Print.
Perlroth, Nicole, Jeff Larson, and Scott Shane. "N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web." The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Sept. 2013. Web. 05 May 2016.
Schneier, Bruce. "Your TV Is Listening to You." CNN. Cable News Network, 12 Feb. 2015. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
US Const. amend. IV. Print.

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