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> One classified document shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into t
by r0h1n 13y ago
> One classified document 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.
This is real-time surveillance of website visitors & search terms to websites that governments don't like. I'm guessing it wouldn't take much for them to correlate those visitors to IP addresses, cookies, device IDs and cell tower signals to pinpoint people in real time too?
Knock knock
Who is it?
It's the police. We know you're browsing Wikileaks right now.
Edit: Looks like GCHQ's "ANTICRISIS GIRL" [0], the tool used to monitor Wikileaks visitors in real time, was based on Piwik [1]
[0] https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/2014/02/piwik2.png https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/2014/02/pi...
[1] http://piwik.org/ http://piwik.org/
- f_salmon 13y agoIt's "funny" how our western system hypocritically decries censorship in China, North Korea et al. when we do the exact same thing, just in a little bit more hidden/less detectable way.
- DanBC 13y agoComparing the UK to North Korea is fucking ridiculous. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-26223040 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-26223040 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26223180 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26223180
- chongli 13y agoNot if you make the comparison repeatedly over time and graph the results.
- keithpeter 13y agoParent comment wasn't comparing UK to NK. Just pointing out that my Prime Minister has spoken in a luke warm sort of way about human rights in China and in a slightly more vigourous way about human rights in NK while knowing all the time that GCHQ were carrying out very detailed observation of oppositional Web sites. My perception was that the parent post was more about the hypocrisy of our political leaders than the UK being a totalitarian country. I agree that any suggestion that the UK is similar to NK is absurd. However, George Orwell did once point out that a revolution and the subsequent imposition of terror in the UK would actually be very easy to do within our legal system...
- praxeologist 13y agoHe is talking solely about how the governments treat internet users, so your comment makes as little sense as me mentioning that the British empire killed far more innocent people than NK ever did.
- DanBC 13y agoMost NK residents don't have any access. The ones that do have very heavily filtered Internet access. North Koreans who watch a prohibited tv show are executed or repeatedly raped while in prison or starved while in prison. Comparin the treatment of North Korean Internet users to the treatment of UK Internet users is obscene. It dilutes the actual point: UK government should not monitor the activities of its citizens without judicial oversight and very narrow reasons. That is an abuse of human rights and it is justifiably something to get angry about. But comparing "monitoring what people send to a website that distributes state secrets" with "forcing a woman to drown her new born baby in a bucket because she read the wrong book" is sub-optimal.
- DanBC 13y agoA less paranoid interpretation is to recognise that governments think that releasing secret documents poses a risk to the security of the country and so the government security agencies will want to know who is providing information to, not consuming information from, Wikileaks. This doesn't make it acceptable.
- tomp 13y agoWhy do they target Assange then?
- dangerlibrary 13y agoSo that he will tell them who is providing the source material...
- e12e 13y agoI'm sure this rationale could be used to justify targeting the Pirate Bay, too. And dropbox/file sharing services. And webmail services. Google docs and similar services. Blogs. (...)
- aspensmonster 13y agoSo I AM on a list! I feel so warm and fuzzy inside all of a sudden :)
- samstave 13y agoHow infiltrated is reddit. I'll wager on a scale from zero to one: 1.
- Phlarp 13y agoHow infiltrated is HackerNews? I'll wager on a scale from zero to one: 1.
- d0 13y agoWell spotted. To be honest, I'd be pissed off if I found out GCHQ had repurposed my project for this sort of thing. Not really possible to fix this situation either as "do no evil" license clauses are pointless.
- __alexs 13y agoIf it was GPL you might be able to argue that they violated the derivatives clause. I doubt it would help since this is top secret intel work and I'm sure they have legal loop holes that essentially allow them to ignore things as trivial as copyright when it suits them.
- eurleif 13y agohttps://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePo...
- __alexs 13y agos/GPL/AGPL/ Which raises the question of whether or not a program that passively wiretaps you falls under the provision of network services clause in that :)
- psykovsky 13y agoSeeing as they talk about the pirate bay as an example of a target I would suspect they care A LOT about copyright issues and would do anything in their power to distribute their source code for the greater good.
- e12e 13y agoThis blanket surveillance reminds me of this interview with Pete Seeger: RetroBites: Pete Seeger - Black List https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0_IME9WsHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0_IME9WsHQ
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sentenza 13y agoOk. The GCHQ affair is making me go crazy, since as soon as i read >ANTICRISIS GIRL my brain came to a screeching halt, because I GET THE REFERENCE! I am possibly the only person on HN go get it, because it is unlikely that anybody else here is a fanatic adherent of the Eurovision Song Contest. The 2009 entry of Ukraine by Svetlana Loboda is called "Be My Valentine! (Anti-crisis Girl)" and here is a link[1]. WARNING: While not strictly NSFW, that video has a half-naked woman yelling "you are sexy bum", background dancers that can only be described as sex-legionaries and a catchy tune. She starts repeatedly screaming "anti-crisis girl" at about 2:30. Now back to meaningful discussion about total global surveillance. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA-HL-EfUbI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA-HL-EfUbI
- chippy 13y agoYour observation is spot on. The people doing the work for GCHQ and the NSA are just like us. They are geeks and technologists. They are probably members of hacker news. This is the most believable part of the fantastic film Enemy of the State - the geeks in the van doing the work.
- toyg 13y ago>The people doing the work for GCHQ and the NSA are just like us. That's the scariest part: it's the banality of evil, updated for the XXI century. Would you turn down a safe and well-paid government job? Would you be a contractor building the Death Star? (for the record, this is not a new question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iQdDRrcAOjA#t=37 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iQd... )
- logicchains 13y agoYou could always take the job and then build a tiny vulnerability into the exhaust ports. It'd be incredibly difficult for anybody to take advantage of such a vulnerability, so you'd probably get away with it.
- 13y ago
- higherpurpose 13y agoI wonder what Merkel and Hollande's new "European Internet" will do to stop GCHQ from tapping the cables like they do now and then just hand over the info to US.
- keithpeter 13y agoI'm not sure, but the fact that they want to 'do something' indicates a reaction to the status quo. In the UK, we have a sort of passive acceptance of high levels of surveillance of the home population going back to the Northern Ireland Emergency starting 1968. It will need a lot to move the politicians away from that.
- dhoulb 13y agoA suspicious man might notice a recent correlating resurgence in IRA bomb threats being bandied all over the news.
- twobits 13y agoTheir problem is that they want to tap the cables too.