Snowden spoke about a previously undisclosed NSA tool

Aug 13, 2014 12:36 GMT  ·  By

Edward Snowden is not done talking about the NSA and the way the intelligence agency oversteps its boundaries and plays a control game that can have dire consequences.

In a special interview for WIRED magazine, the whistleblower reveals that the NSA has developed a scary project called “MonsterMind” which can respond to cyberattacks from other countries without agents even intervening in any way.

The system works by automating the process of hunting for the beginning of a foreign cyberattacks. The NSA’s software is always on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks, and when one is detected, MonsterMind blocks it from entering the country.

While this type of security system isn’t exactly new, NSA’s tool also has the ability to fight back against the attack, without any human getting involved in the process, which is, of course, the tricky part.

The project is great from the point of view of national security, but Snowden points out that there is a huge risk of causing some international friction for no good reason, effectively giving birth to yet another set of diplomatic issues for the United States.

And that’s because this type of attacks can be spoofed. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next,” Snowden asks.

What’s more, the whistleblower views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because in order for the NSA to fight against threats, it first needs to get access to all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the United States.

“The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we're analyzing all traffic flows. And if we're analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time,” Snowden says, painting the scary picture where privacy means nothing to the NSA.

Even though this revelation is perfectly new and MonsterMind has never been discussed before, the news of NSA’s way of sacrificing citizens’ privacy whether there was a real threat or not is not at all surprising, at least not after more than a year of revelations.