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A new analysis of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden details a highly classified technique that allows the National Security Agency to "deliberately divert" US internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans.
According to the new analysis, the NSA has clandestine means of "diverting portions of the river of internet traffic that travels on global communications cables," which allows it to bypass protections put into place by Congress to prevent domestic surveillance on Americans.
The new findings, published Thursday, follows a 2014 paper by researchers Axel Arnbak and Sharon Goldberg, published on sister-site CBS News, which theorized that the NSA, whose job it is to produce intelligence from overseas targets, was using a "traffic shaping" technique to route US internet data overseas so that it could be incidentally collected under the authority of a largely unknown executive order.
US citizens are afforded constitutional protections against surveillance or searches of their personal data. Any time the government wants to access an American's data, they must follow the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, a Washington DC-based court that authorizes the government's surveillance programs.
But if that same data is collected outside the US, the bulk of the NSA's authority stems from a presidential decree dating back more than three decades.
[...] The government's use of traffic shaping exploits a fundamental principle about internet traffic: Data takes the quickest and most efficient route, which sometimes means bouncing from different countries around the globe, rather than staying within a country's borders.
That allows the NSA to vacuum up data it treats as an overseas communication -- with little regard for whether the data belongs to an American.
Source: ZDNet
(Score: 2, Interesting) by technoid_ on Sunday July 02 2017, @10:25PM (2 children)
Ever wonder if traffic shaping done by the government is part of why Net Neutrality was repealed?
If Net Neutrality in place it might make it easier to detect when the government has shaped the traffic to allow for analyzing or manipulating the traffic.
We can't have that, think of the children.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @02:31AM (1 child)
what are you even talking about? you act like net neutrality is some kind of fucking device or software you plug in, when in reality its just a set of guidelines in regard to corporate interactions with peering providers/datacenters. net neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with the NSA at all, because the NSA taps into backbone providers fiber lines directly, and can do with it as they see fit, if they want to reroute traffic or add an extra jump through their blackboxes to record everything, they can and will do it. No amount of prosumer circlejerk laws can prevent that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @02:55AM
Ah, now that you've cleared that up, I completely believe you that the push against net neutrality had nothing to do with the NSA. Thanks