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posted by martyb on Sunday July 02 2017, @11:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the BGP? dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @03:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @03:34AM (#534325)

    Yup... us Americans... seem like we do whatever we are told to do.

    We are too damned scared and fearful to stand up to authority. If whining does not work, cower.

    We are taught to use the word "please" a lot, so hopefully the corrections administered will be lighter.