The NSA will spy on you for reading this article

Are you looking for ways to protect your privacy while browsing the web? Are you trying to learn how to use Tor, the browser that anonymize your Internet traffic? Are you interested in ditching Windows for something that’s more privacy-friendly? The good news is that there are ways to do that. The bad news is that this sort of online behavior apparently triggers NSA spying, especially if you’re a foreigner.

A report from German site Tagesshau reveals that the NSA has a computer system dedicated to accessing Tor called XKeyscore. The NSA apparently digs for “deep-packet inspection” Internet users located outside of U.S., Canada, the U.K. and other countries that comprise the Five Eyes countries that work with the NSA on surveillance programs.

Hating Windows is apparently another infraction that will get you on the short list, especially if you’re looking to install the Tails operating system, which is generally used by people looking to guard their privacy.

Reporting on Tagesshau’s findings, Boing Boing speculates that the NSA and its partners might be using these simple mass surveillance spying practices to divide Internet users into two principal categories: Those who don’t care about guarding their privacy online, and those who use services like Tor, Tails and others.

It appears that even looking for information about Tor and Tails – and potentially reading this post – will get you fingerprinted.

The NSA’s intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats – to split the entire population of the Internet into ‘people who have the technical know-how to be private’ and ‘people who don’t’ and then capture all the communications from the first group,” the site continues. 

It’s believed that details about this NSA operation may come from a second source other than Snowden, although it’s not clear who that person is. 

Even though it might sound scary to the regular user looking for online data protection, the NSA’s thinking isn’t illogical. It makes perfect sense to want to know who’s looking to hide their online activity behind things like Tor and Tails because some of the people who do it are indeed up to no good. They’re not reporters looking to protect their sources, and they’re not living in oppressed countries. Some of them are the bad guys the NSA is trying to catch, and bad guys will almost certainly want to protect all online activity with the help of these encrypted technologies.

The investigation discloses the following:

• Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by the NSA. 
• Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA. 
• Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states. 
• The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called "the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of the Linux Community", and calls it 
  an "extremist forum".

sorces:
bgr.com, Das Erste, Boing Boing, Google