14 DAY TRIAL // Are you using the anonymizer service Tor to keep your identity a secret when you’re online? Well, then you should know that the NSA considers you a potential “extremist.”
According to a report from NDR and WDR, two German publications, TOR users are marks for the NSA, which means that thousands of journalists, lawyers and rights activists are on their list, making for a rather big threat for the safety of their data, including the identity of their sources of news, information from clients and cases.
If you happen to look for encryption software such as Tails while you’re browsing the Internet, you’re also on the NSA’s watchlist.
This doesn’t come from any new NSA leaked files, but rather from an analysis of the source code used by XKeyScore, one of the most important tools the NSA uses for electronic surveillance.
The two German sources revealed that trying to stay anonymous while scouring the Internet is about as big a crime as being a terrorist of some kind. Even visiting the website of the Tor project gets you on the bad side.
This, however, is not exactly a surprise since it is known that the NSA keeps tabs on certain keywords used on popular search engines. The nasty part is that the agency monitors connections to the Directory Authorities, which are the right servers acting as gateways for the system.
The research showed that the servers based in Germany were particularly interesting to the NSA. One of them is operated by the Chaos Computer Club, while the other is in the hands of Sebastian Hahn, a computer science student.
While the system continues to be completely safe to use, those who do enter anonymity land through Tor’s gateways get their IP addresses collected. The NSA has plenty of other data bases to choose from in order to cross reference the information and find out who’s who.
As a reminder, Tor is a system of servers which routes user requests through a series of secured connections making it impossible to identify a user’s IP from the addresses or websites he or she uses, and thus, making them virtually impossible to track. By keeping an eye on the access points, however, the NSA at least knows who uses Tor, but not what people do while inside the network.
It also seems like the NSA may be collecting more than metadata on these targets that it deems as “extremists,” which may include reading the email exchanges with Tor.
XKeyScore will also trigger an alert if you simply look for an encryption software to hide the contents of your email, which is of course quite bad since the entire world is moving towards encrypting their data.