Published on Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, the new papers reveal internal NSA discussions over what can and cannot be monitored in various circumstances.

In Q&A‘s between NSA staff, Threat Operations Center Oversight and Compliance (NOC), and the NSA’s Office of General Council (OGC), torrent sites are mentioned on a number of occasions, with The Pirate Bay sitting front and center.

Tracking The Pirate Bay and its users

The first question concerns the querying of non US-based IP addresses which have been obtained from home soil.

“If we run across foreign malicious actors at home (spam email, router/IDS logs, torrent sites, etc) can we bring those IPs here and use the SIGINT [intelligence-gathering by interception] system to monitor these guys?” the member of staff asked.

“It might be okay,” NOC and OGC responded, “but wait for confirmation.”

The second instance came from a staff member asking questions over the monitoring of servers overseas, alongside the possibility that U.S. citizens may be using them.

“Is it okay to query against a foreign server known to be malicious even if there is a possibility that a US person could be using it as well? Example, thepiratebay.org,” the NSA employee wrote.

No problem, came the reply, but exercise caution.

“Okay to go after foreign servers which US people use also (with no defeats). But try to minimize to ‘post’ only, for example, to filter out non-pertinent information,” NOC and OGC wrote back.

From the documents it’s clear that the NSA sees both The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks as organizations that threaten U.S. security through their distribution of U.S. secrets. What follows is a question which seems to suggests that once a torrent has been released on The Pirate Bay, it’s possible to analyze traffic sent before the release was made in order to trace the leaker.

“[If a] list of .mil passwords [were] released to thepiratebay.org…can we go back into XKS-SIGINT (using a custom created fingerprint) to search for all traffic containing that password in foreign traffic just before the release? the NSA worker asked.

Tracking people using proxies to hide their activities

While many consider proxies as useful tools to mask their online activities, it has to be presumed that organizations such as the NSA have the ability to track individuals using even multiple instances. The next set of questions skip over the mechanics of how that might be possible (with the clear implication that it is) and jump straight to what is permissible.

[When an actor is]….posting to thepiratebay.org (a foreign web-server)….through multiple proxied hops, are we allowed to back-trace that communication even if it hops through US based proxies?” an NSA worker asked.

“In other words, back-trace the post from thepiratebay.org to a Chinese base proxy which came through a US based proxy, which came through another US based proxy, which came through a Russian based proxy etc”

“Assuming you mean via SIGINT metadata,” came the NOC response, “then SPCMA-trained [Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis] analysts would be able to use SPCMA-enabled tools to chain through U.S. based proxies. It is not authorized otherwise.”

While on the one hand these discussions suggest that some kind of effort is being made to protect US citizens from NSA spying, on the other it’s fairly obvious that they are being swept up en masse whether they like it or not.

Furthermore, the odds of being caught up in that dragnet only increase should U.S. citizens dare to become involved in organizations like Wikileaks or use torrent sites including The Pirate Bay. Worryingly, the threshold for becoming categorized as an associate of a “malicious foreign actor” appears to be lower than ever.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Sparked and guided by Aaron Swartz, the end result of the movement was nothing short of ground-breaking. The unity shown on January 18, 2012, led to Congress backing down and forcing some of the world’s most powerful copyright-focused companies into retreat. SOPA was done, but an even bigger issue was just around the corner.

Revelations by Edward Snowden, that unveiled a shocking level of mass surveillance being carried out by the U.S. government and its allies, caused turmoil around the world. Their plan was to become the all-seeing all-knowing eye, spying on communications everywhere and sucking up mind-boggling quantities of electronic data both on-and-offline.

These authorities now routinely spy on the Internet, telephone calls and other communication channels used by their very own citizens, undermining the basic level of privacy people believed would be upheld by their own democratically elected governments. The mantra that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to worry about holds no water, as entities including the NSA and GCHQ systematically spy wherever they like, whether their targets are suspected of crimes or not.

But today is a special day. Thousands of websites, this one included, will join together to demand progress towards restoring our right to privacy and the reigning in of mass surveillance. Two years after the historic SOPA protests, The Day We Fight Back has arrived.

Today’s anti-surveillance web protest, held in memory of hacktivist Aaron Swartz, is being headed up by a coalition including Demand Progress, Access, EFF, and sites such as Reddit, Mozilla and BoingBoing. It provides an unprecedented opportunity to fight back against the greatest invasion of privacy the world has ever known.

“Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency’s mass spying regime,” says David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress.

“If Aaron were alive he’d be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings.”

While Aaron is tragically no longer with us, all Internet users concerned about the activities of the NSA can step up to the front lines and fight back with a few clicks.

1. Visit TheDayWeFightBack.org
2. Sign up to indicate that you’ll participate and receive updates.
3. Install widgets on websites encouraging its visitors to fight back against surveillance.
4. Use the social media tools on the site to announce your participation.
5. Develop memes, tools, websites, and do whatever else you can to participate — and encourage others to do the same.

While a large proportion of Internet users have been blind-sided by the revelations of the past year, being monitored is something that those connected to the file-sharing scene have become aware of for a decade or more. Privacy solutions have existed for some time but it took the launch of the Pirate Party-affiliated Relakks VPN service in 2006 to really boost the awareness of encrypted communications in the file-sharing space. Today, privacy companies including Private Internet Access and BlackVPN will join the protests.

Many hundreds of thousands – millions – of file-sharers and other privacy conscious individuals currently and routinely encrypt their communications in order to mitigate the effects of online spying. But while that’s a good day-to-day solution, more needs to be done.

Fighting back requires people to contact politicians and lawmakers and urge them to engage on the issues of cyber surveillance and other dangers to the free Internet. But be warned. Unlike the fight against SOPA this battle won’t be over in a month or two. The Day We Fight Back will go on for much, much longer.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The EFF is representing 19 diverse groups including Free Press, the Free Software Foundation, Greenpeace, the Callguns Foundation and the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles.

The lawsuit accuses the authorities of violating the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights of the groups and its members by gaining access to their phone records.

“The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA’s mass, untargeted collection of Americans’ phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,” EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn says.

“Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation,” Cohn adds

“Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years.”

The EFF seeks confirmation that the NSA surveillance programs violate the constitution and demands that they are stopped.

The complaint

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.