Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Friday January 16 2015, @11:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the hey-they're-talking-to-me-too! dept.

It’s common knowledge the NSA collects plenty of data on suspected terrorists as well as ordinary citizens but the agency also has algorithms in place to filter out information that doesn’t need to be collected or stored for further analysis, such as spam emails. Now Alice Truong reports that during operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, the US was able to analyze laptops formerly owned by Taliban members and according to NSA officer Michael Wertheimer discovered an email written in English found on the computers contained a purposely spammy subject line: “CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT.” According to Wertheimer, the email was sent to and from nondescript addresses that were later confirmed to belong to combatants. "It is surely the case that the sender and receiver attempted to avoid allied collection of this operational message by triggering presumed “spam” filters (PDF)." From a surveillance perspective, Wertheimer writes that this highlights the importance of filtering algorithms. Implementing them makes parsing huge amounts of data easier, but it also presents opportunities for someone with a secret to figure out what type of information is being tossed out and exploit the loophole.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17 2015, @03:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17 2015, @03:06AM (#135588)

    Yep. But it is such a seductive story. It's like poor man's steganography. I bet within a week it gets mentioned on the national nightly news.

    It's also great for the anti-NSA angle - they want to collect it all and (David Cameron wants to) outlaw cryptography and it will all be for naught because terrerists can make it look like spam.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17 2015, @04:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17 2015, @04:15AM (#135593)

    not sure how they could effectively enforce a law that bans steganography. what are they gunna do? inspect every cat pic on the internet for possible hidden messages? what if they find something? they gunna arrest a 16 year old girl on terrorist charges because their super-awesome steganography-detection algorithm throws up a positive on her favebook selfie?