Edward Snowden’s latest disclosure regarding the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic surveillance program reveals the agency is surreptitiously using advertising tracking cookies in users’ web browsers to surveil and locate individuals and to identify hacking targets. This conclusively ends the notion that browser tracking cookies are in any way innocuous. Using Google’s PREF cookie, the NSA and its international counterparts can focus on a single individual’s internet communications as well as send out exploitative software to the target’s computer. Rather than the indiscriminate hoovering of massive amounts of information about huge populations, this approach allows the NSA to focus intensely on a specific target.
Additionally, the most recent Snowden disclosure reveals that the NSA is also using commercially collected location information from smartphones, which is much more precise than the location information gained from cell towers.
Washington Post: NSA signal-surveillance success stories.
In a related development, an internal NSA document disclosed by Snowden reveals that the agency can easily decrypt the A5/1 encryption used in older 2G GSM mobile phones. US law requires a court order to obtain the content of mobile phone conversations between US citizens.
Washington Post: How the NSA pinpoints a mobile device.It remains unknown how the NSA is obtaining this information and whether or not Google and the smartphone manufacturers are willfully cooperating or being coerced to provide access to the information under a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order. In an interesting coincidence of timing, Larry Page — Google’s chief executive — and other technology company executives called for ending indiscriminate collection of user data and limiting court-ordered surveillance requests.
During the time of Snowden’s most recent disclosures, US Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) chaired a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the continued oversight of US government surveillance.
When asked about Leahy’s proposed USA Freedom Act (.pdf; 161KB) that would ban indiscriminate bulk data collection, Deputy Attorney General James Cole testified that because of ambiguous language in the bill the NSA would probably not cease its domestic surveillance activities without a court order.
“Right now the interpretation of the word ‘relevant’ is a broad interpretation,” Cole testified with regard to the proposed legislation’s mandate that surveillance activities and data gathering be “relevant and material” to a foreign intelligence investigation.
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Google’s PREF cookie, mobile phones, and the meaning of “relevant” was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Friday, 20 December 2013 at 11:30 AM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)