Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

PRISM is/was an NSA intelligence-gathering program. It has been widely speculated that friendly governments spy on other countries so that said country doesn't violate laws about spying on their own people. And this happened in NZ. The activist was from Fiji, and was very active in trying to get democracy for Fiji and get rid of the prime minister. So in sweeps the NSA and PRISM to try and find dirt on him, which they did not find.

First Confirmed Prism Surveillance Target Was Democracy Activist (fortune.com)

Posted by manishs on Monday August 15, 2016 @08:00AM from the truth-is-out-there dept.
A new report by Television New Zealand in collaboration with The Intercept, based on leaks of former U.S. National Security Agency worker Edward Snowden has for the first time named a target of the NSA's controversial Prism program. The target was a middle-aged civil servant and pro-democracy activist named Tony Fullman. Fullman, who is originally from Fiji but has lived in New Zealand for decades, is an advocate for democracy in Fiji and a critic of Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama, who took power in a 2006 coup.

From a Fortune report:
According to The Intercept, the NSA in 2012 monitored Fullman's communications through the Prism program and passed on information to the New Zealand intelligence services. Around the same time, the New Zealand authorities raided Fullman's home and revoked his passport. The New Zealand intelligence services were not themselves allowed to spy on Fullman, who was a New Zealand citizen. However, as Snowden has repeatedly described, the agencies of many Anglophone countries spy on each other's behalf, in order to bypass their national legal restrictions. Fullman suggested in the article that people in the group may well have said violent things about Bainimarama, but this was just venting, not a plot. According to the report, they never suspected someone was listening into their communications. The NSA was said to be helping by analyzing Fullman's Facebook and Gmail activities. The 190 pages of intercepted documentation seen by The Intercept apparently didn't reveal evidence of a plot.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/08/15/1341241/first-confirmed-prism-surveillance-target-was-democracy-activist

So, a few years ago a Chinese telcom company started selling network switches and routers around the world. Their name is Huawei and their founder is a former officer of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. A scream went up throughout the USA that their routers would come already compromised and the Chinese government could listen in to all our network traffic and copy all our s3kritz.

Little did we know that the NSA was already hacking our routers and listening to all our network traffic.

Well, it turns out that the NSA also attacked Huawei to get their documentation and source code, so they could hack their equipment when it's installed in countries like North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Hypocrite much?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/nsa_hacks_huawe.html

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/03/22/226205/nsa-hacked-huawei-stole-source-code

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-chinese-government-and-networking-firm-huawei-a-960199.html

The problem is further compounded by something called software-defined networks (SDN). Normally networks are configured in routers and through cabling, but these SDNs break that model, and apparently the NSA does not yet know how to cope with them.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/03/how-huawei-became-nsa-nightmare/

It was called the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and apparently was superseded by PRISM.

Here's my question. I remember a few years ago a person proposed a program, I believe it was a retired Navy Admiral (are there any other kind? the Navy Admiral bit), and it was called the Total Surveillance Program. Both are TSP. It was rumored after the first TSP (Total, not Terrorist) was shut down that there were efforts to break it in to smaller pieces. I wonder if one of them is the Terrorist TSP in whole or in part.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/12/21/256101601/new-nsa-documents-make-case-for-keeping-programs-secret

Very cute!

Basically, the NSA doesn't want to watch communications on a computer-by-computer basis. They tap backbones, the connections where huge amounts of information flows between internet servers. They tap major ISPs. Your computer? Chump change. If they know what you're saying to other people, they don't really need to tap your computer. And the thing that makes this possible?

Weak routers.

A router takes the packets generated from all of the computers on your network, wired or wireless, aggregates them, and sends them upstream across your connection to another router at your ISP that has a faster connection, which sends them upstream to another router with a faster connection, etc. Eventually your traffic gets to your destination and information comes back, and the routers (also known as hops) between your PC and the server/site that you wanted to access, can deconstruct the information and get it back to its origin. The problem is that routers are not easy to configure, it takes some specialized information, and that if you need to patch it, you risk breaking the configuration. And a broken configuration means down-time, a bad thing.

So most of the time, once a router is working well and the configuration is backed up, it's pretty rare that they're upgraded. The upgrades are risky because a vast majority of businesses don't have a duplicate network set up so that router patches can be tested.

And a router that is not upgraded, just like your computer, is vulnerable to being compromised and exploited.

So the NSA's money is best spent compromising and monitoring the routers upstream of your connection, because there is a lot more information present at that point, so it's more efficient.

Which is not to say that they can't compromise your computer and get in and look at things directly.

There is an old maxim about what defines a secure computer: it's not connected to any communication device, it's turned off, buried in 10' of concrete, and in a locked room with an armed guard. It's highly unlikely that a computer thus secure can be compromised.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-router-hacking/

There’s so much data available on the internet that even government cyberspies need a little help now and then to sift through it all. So to assist them, the National Security Agency produced a book to help its spies uncover intelligence hiding on the web.

The 643-page tome, called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (.pdf), was just released by the NSA following a FOIA request filed in April by MuckRock, a site that charges fees to process public records for activists and others.

The book was published by the Center for Digital Content of the National Security Agency, and is filled with advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive and other online tools. But the most interesting is the chapter titled “Google Hacking.”

Interesting stuff. The document is a bit dated, it was last updated in 2007, but the fundamentals wouldn't change that radically.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/05/nsa-manual-on-hacking-internet/

http://search.slashdot.org/story/13/05/09/1434237/the-nsas-own-guide-to-google-hacking-and-other-internet-research

Not terribly surprised. People in the NSA and the Executive Branch violated the NSA charter and the U.S. Constitution, and they don't care. It's probable that a lot of American tech secrets are going straight in to competing Israeli tech companies.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1


I listened to a repeat of an interview with the late Senator Robert Byrd, and he was talking about the time shortly after 9/11 when he did a scathing speech on the floor of the Senate lambasting his fellow Senators for cow-towing to Bush for fear of being branded un-Patriotic. Then Bush creates a shadow government without consulting the Senate. where Byrd was #3 in the line of succession to the Presidency, then goes on to create the Department of Homeland Security with zero input from the Senate.

Our freedoms are a far cry from what we had 15 years ago.