Drip, Drip, Drip

One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, 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.

[...]

The agency logged data showing hundreds of users from around the world, including the United States, as they were visiting a WikiLeaks site –contradicting claims by American officials that a deal between the U.K. and the U.S. prevents each country from spying on the other’s citizens.

[...]

In a statement to The Intercept, [Wikileaks founder Julian] Assange condemned what he called “the reckless and unlawful behavior of the National Security Agency” and GCHQ’s “extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publisher’s website and its readers.”

“News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling,” Assange said. “Today, we call on the White House to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSA’s criminal activity against the media, including WikiLeaks, its staff, its associates and its supporters.”

  The Intercept

And also, today, White House personnel are LOLing each other in response. The NSA is NOT reading those texts, of course, but it has noted an uptick in texting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

If they treat internet activity like they are treating phone activity, theoretically, you could be on the NSA’s target list by virtue of that two hops business. YWA has (albeit some years past) read and linked to Wikileaks articles. And you have read YWA. Two hops. And Bob’s your uncle.

Okay. No fair. That’s fear-mongering. The NSA probably doesn’t have any record of you and your metadata ANYwhere in its system. No. Really. Just ask your president. (Besides, you have nothing to fear because you are not doing anything wrong.)

According to the document – which quotes a response by the NSA’s Office of General Counsel and the oversight and compliance office of its Threat Operations Center – discovering that an American has been selected for surveillance must be mentioned in a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”

See?

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in surveillance issues, says the revelations shed a disturbing light on the NSA’s willingness to sweep up American citizens in its surveillance net.

“All the reassurances Americans heard that the broad authorities of the FISA Amendments Act could only be used to ‘target’ foreigners seem a bit more hollow,” Sanchez says, “when you realize that the ‘foreign target’ can be an entire Web site or online forum used by thousands if not millions of Americans.”

Well, not so much nowadays. Thousands, maybe.

“How could targeting an entire website’s user base be necessary or proportionate?” says Gus Hosein, executive director of the London-based human rights group Privacy International. “These are innocent people who are turned into suspects based on their reading habits. Surely becoming a target of a state’s intelligence and security apparatus should require more than a mere click on a link. [...] The fact that ministers are ordering the monitoring of political interests of Internet users shows a systemic failure in the rule of law.”

Welcome to Stasiland.

And, btw, we might be forgiven for suspecting that The Intercept is under similar secret monitoring.