Thursday, November 28, 2013



The NSA, PRISM and porn

The latest NSALeak: the NSA uses people's surfing habits to undermine and discredit them:

The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.

The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT" -- or signals intelligence, the interception of communications -- "assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues.

Among the vulnerabilities listed by the NSA that can be effectively exploited are “viewing sexually explicit material online” and “using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls.”


Its a pretty obvious application of the NSA's mass-surveillance. PRISM lets them know everyone's dirty little online secrets. But its not just about porn - the NSA documents list "inconsistent arguments", "disagree[ment] with AQ on some issues", "exorbitant speaking fees" and "mistirect[ed] donations" as ways of undermining people. So its pretty clear that they're doing a full trawl of targets - and faced with that and an agency looking for ways to spin anything to its advantage, very few people would survive such scrutiny. And note who they're applying it to: not to actual terrorists, but to people who merely disagree with US policy. So we have a government acting as the online Stasi, using mass surveillance to dig into people's private lives to prevent them from exercising their freedom of speech against it.

As the article points out, the US has a long and dirty history of doing this to its domestic political opponents, for example wiretapping Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists in an effort to get dirt to discredit them. The NSA was up to its neck in such dirty, anti-democratic actions, before it was legally barred from operating in the US (which means that it simply gets the FBI to front for it, with the data ending up in the same databases). Its not surprising that they've continued using such tactics.

There are two obvious concerns which immediately arise. Firstly, there is one group which is exquisitely vulnerable to such tactics: politicians. And thanks to secrecy, we'll never be able to be sure that the NSA is not using this technology to promote its own domestic political aims and target those seeking to limit its powers or cut its budget. But its not just about government power-games - think of what a government could do with it if they decided to use it against their political opponents. Think of what Richard Nixon would have done with it. And that alone is a reason why this program, and the agency which runs it, must be shut down. Mass-surveillance is simply inconsistent with democracy.