14 DAY TRIAL // The National Security Agency has apparently been using cookies to track surveillance targets, which has ultimately improved its monitoring abilities.
According to a report published by the Washington Post, new slides indicate that the tracking method used by websites and advertisers serves a double purpose of spying tool.
It looks like the NSA and the GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, have even found a way to analyze a type of cookie specific to Google, also known as “PREF,” which doesn’t include a user’s personal information, but it does contain numeric codes enabling websites to uniquely identify a person’s browser.
So, the most important fact is that this type of cookie allows the NSA to single out a target’s communications among a sea of Internet data, whom they can later send out software that can hack their computer.
The slide that the Washington Post refers to indicates that cookies are used to “enable remote exploitation,” although no specific attacks of the kind are mentioned in this particular document.
This new tool that is unveiled stands out among the rest of the spying practices of the National Security Agency as it isn’t used to collect information from everyone, but rather to look into what a particular suspect is doing, helping them learn more about that individual and his or her habits.
The document also indicates another project that the NSA has been working on – using commercially gathered information to help locate mobile devices around the world. The job is already done halfway by the large number of apps running on iPhones and Android devices, or even the operating systems themselves, which track the user’s location, most often without specific warnings.
Recently, it has been revealed that the government agency also collects cell phone location data from all over the world, but this new technique gathers up a lot more specific data.
“On a macro level, ‘we need to track everyone everywhere for advertising’ translates into ‘the government being able to track everyone everywhere,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a lecturer at UC Berkeley Law.
The NSA has given out a statement saying the same things it has said like a million times – that everything is within the law and that all these tools are used to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States.
Google has so far issued no statement, but it is most likely not happy about this entire situation.